There has been some press in advance of last week’s Black Hat conference speaking of vulnerabilities in commercial-aircraft flight management systems and possible implications for the safety of flight, for example in a Reuters article by Jim Finkle from August 4. The article is technically fairly accurate on the claims made and the manufacturer’s response,…
The International Telecommunications Union has been conducting its four-yearly meeting. Its president has apparently promised everyone to make possible the real-time transmission of flight data from commercial transport aircraft in flight. This has been supported by the Malaysian delegate. All according to this news report: MH370: ITU Commits to Integrate Flight Data Recorders with Big…
John Downer pointed me to an article in the Sunday Express, which appears to be one of their most-read: World’s first cyber hijack: was missing Malaysia Airlines plane hacked with mobile phone? by James Fielding and Stuart Winter. The answer is no. To see why, read on. The authors interviewed a Dr. Sally Leivesley, who…
Pete Seeger died early today. It popped up on my iPad as I was reading the morning news. There is lots to say about Pete, most of it not by me. The New York Times’s obituary by Jon Pareles does justice to the man. His music speaks for itself. Because, as he would probably say,…
In August 2011, we held the 11th Bieleschweig Workshop on Systems Engineering. The theme was the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. We have just published a book on it. An Analytical Table of Contents may be found at the end of this note. I had convened a mailing list in the days…
The Guardian yesterday wrote an encomium to the UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor Prof. Sir John Beddington (I hope they don’t mind that I quote in full): Politics may not be the enemy of scientific method, but they are hardly intimate friends. Science inches along by experiment, evidence and testing (and retesting); politics is often…
The International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC, is currently preparing an international standard to be known as IEC 62740 Root Cause Analysis. I prepared some material for potential inclusion in the standards document but as of writing it appears it will not be used. I think it is quite useful, so I make it hereby available. The…
A bit of intellectual biography, prompted by a couple of days’ free time leading me to a paper written 27 years ago by a pal, which I have just read. I say a little of what’s in the paper, to encourage others to read it. And then I comment on a couple of disappointing aspects…
Just over a decade ago, in July 2002, there was a catastrophic mid-air collision of a Russian passenger aircraft heading westwards and a freighter aircraft of DHL heading northward, near the town of Überlingen on Lake Constance (Bodensee) in Southern Germany near the Swiss border. I wrote a paper on it about a month later,…