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International-UN-NGOs
Did Russian Planes Jam LAX Flight Control?
2014-05-08
A U-2 spy plane is being blamed for a software glitch at a Californian air traffic control center which led to delays earlier this week.

According to NBC News, the U-2 was flying at 60,000 feet, but air traffic control computers were attempting to keep it from colliding with planes that were actually miles beneath it.

The computers at the L.A. Center are programmed to keep commercial airliners and other aircraft from colliding with each other.

The spy plane's altitude and route apparently overloaded a computer system called ERAM, which generates display data for air-traffic controllers. Back-up computer systems also failed

But within days of the original report, disseminated across broadcast networks all over America, the Air Force officially denied that it was a U-2 spy plane, claiming they found the glitch but provided no reason for what caused it:

With the revelation this week that Russia has deployed strategic bomber fleets for fly-by's along our West Coast to gather intelligence and test their capabilities, is it possible that someone flipped a switch to see what would happen?

The Air Force likely knows what caused the outage but refuses to share details, which suggests that either the United States was engaged in a military exercise and they want to keep it under wraps, or, it was the Russians and going public could further inflame the already heated geo-political climate.

Both the United States and Russia have advanced stealth and jamming systems, either of which may have been responsible for the LAX outage. But one particular technology stands out, especially considering that Airforce technicians had to step in to resolve the issue.
Posted by:Bubba Graiting8281

#6  That makes entirely too much sense. It will be soundly ignored.
Posted by: Rob Crawford   2014-05-08 23:00  

#5  From a post on the subject over at Slashdot:

It was a NASA owned U-2. They do atmospheric testing. They basically fly a pattern in the sky over and over. The problem with the flight plan was that the U-2 was assigned VFR-on-Top. What that mean is the plane was flying using VFR(Visual) flight rules on top of clouds. This normally occurs below 18000 feet. As such, I think the VFR-on-Top system was only designed for below 18000 feet. As the U-2 was above 60000 feet, the system was processing it for conflicts at every altitude, causing a buffer overflow. They are working on a patch to fix that problem, and in the meantime have implemented a workaround for us. That's what our memo told us at work. Source: I'm an air traffic controller at Denver En-route ARTCC.
Posted by: SteveS   2014-05-08 22:03  

#4  
It turns out that ADS-B signals look a lot like little bits of computer code.


WTF? This doesn't make any sense. Does it mean they're digital signals? Why do people spew gibberish and think it makes them sound intelligent? Is it because of Star Trek?

I suspect it was a bad update (or original issue) that had a data conversion problem when dealing with a flight at extreme altitudes. Extremely easy error to make, hard to catch, and can generate exceptions or other failure conditions.
Posted by: Rob Crawford   2014-05-08 21:12  

#3  NextGen Air Traffic Control System rolled out under the Obama regime is another Obama software roll out disaster from a security perspective.
Posted by: Bubba Graiting8281   2014-05-08 18:46  

#2  It turns out that ADS-B signals look a lot like little bits of computer code. But unlike traffic on the Internet, these signals are unencrypted and unauthenticated. And for computer security geeks like Haines, these are huge red flags. He soon realized he could spoof these signals and create fake "ghost planes" in the sky.

"The threats can be things like, if I can inject 50 extra flights onto an air traffic controller's screen, they are not going to know what is going on," he says.

Brad "RenderMan" Haines was able to spoof the signals used in the NextGen system and create fake planes in the sky.i
Brad "RenderMan" Haines was able to spoof the signals used in the NextGen system and create fake planes in the sky.

Courtesy of Brad Haines
Now, this hack won't make planes fall out of the air, but it could be dangerous. A fake plane could cause a real pilot to swerve — or a series of ghost planes could shut down an airport.

"If you could introduce enough chaos into the system — for even an hour — that hour will ripple though the entire world's air traffic control," Haines says.

Haines and a partner, Nick Foster, were not only able to create a radio capable of broadcasting spoofed signals, they were also able to hook a radio to a free online flight simulator game called Flight Gear. They used the game to create a ghost plane — a plane that would appear to be real to air traffic controllers using ADS-B — and then they buzzed San Francisco International Airport. LINK

This is exactly what happened at LAX. A spy plane U2 or Russian is NOT going to respond with exact GPS coordinates. It is going to respond with false coordinates, not caring if those false coordinates make the air traffic controllers see a (ghost) plane about to crash into another (real) plane, or make the controllers think the system has just went haywire thus shutting down the system immediately.

OR a Russian plane along the coast spoofed ghost planes into the system to cause a few skipped heart beats for pilots and controllers.

The reason the cause was not released was just as this article said. The new NextGen system at LAX can be compromised and the FAA is probably freaking out at this moment about what just happened and have NO answers now that the new non-radar spoof-able system is now THE system at LAX.
Posted by: Bubba Graiting8281   2014-05-08 18:38  

#1  Or was it space aliens? Come on, guys. If you are going to do conspiracy theories, go strong or go home.
Posted by: SteveS   2014-05-08 18:02  

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