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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Dream on.

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After echoing around various newsgroups and discussion fora for a week or two, the Boeing Dreamliner 787 computer architecture scare has now made it to the pages of the daily press. If you haven’t been following this one, it appears that Boeing, having noticed that their latest products amount to a heap of computers in an aluminium can with a couple of wings and a few seats added, made some simplifications. The aircraft has a network architecture in which, it seems, some resources are shared – the word “backbone” has been used so presumably some form of high-bandwidth bus is what we are talking about. Shared to the extent that there is no longer a complete physical separation between flight systems and passenger information/entertainment systems.
The FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) are reportedly less-than-impressed with this: the nightmare scenario, and of course the one that the daily press picked up, is of someone sitting at the back, hacking into the aircraft’s flight systems and taking – or disrupting – control. Boeing are issuing various soothing statements to the effect that a combination of very limited inter-operation of systems, and hardware/software firewalls, means it’s all OK.
I have to say I’m with the Feds on this one. The passenger/hacker scenario seems pretty unlikely – but then so did the idea of a bunch of semi-trained hijackers flying planes into tall buildings, before it happened. Much more likely is some unforeseen systems failure, or interaction, disrupting essential services by overwhelming the shared resources. The history of engineering, and aviation in particular, is punctuated by people standing around looking at heaps of debris, scratching their heads and saying, “never expected it to go wrong that way.” This seems – on the face of it, we don’t really know enough – to be an unnecessary embellishment to the airborne architecture.
Totally separate, isolated bits of wire for the avionics, please. Let’s face it, it’s worth the extra miles of copper if only to not have to listen to all the conspiracy theories if it ever does go wrong.

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