Wi-Fi-equipped aircraft are not as vulnerable to nefarious hackers as some media reports claim, according to Peter Skaves, the FAA’s chief scientific and technical advisor for advanced avionics. In a report issued last week, the Government Accountability Office said the FAA has “started reviewing rules for certifying the cyber security of all new aircraft systems,” as it also decides how to prevent hackers from gaining access to the evolving NextGen ATC system, especially in light of the prolific use of tablet computers such as the Apple iPad.
Speaking at the Chicago Area Business Aviation Association’s Safety Day on Thursday, Skaves said unlike Internet-linked tablets that operate hundreds of applications, “aircraft work within a highly customized closed system that often contains only one program. [For the most part] we don’t download things from the Internet. We also don’t allow EFBs to write to any flight control systems.”
Skaves said updates that are sent electronically don’t go directly into the flight management system, so the cockpit crew must first approve everything. In addition, the crew could simply turn off the autoflight system should there be a concern. Aircraft operate with “multiple layers of redundancy,” Skaves said. “If the GPS were hacked, the pilots could still navigate with inertial navigation systems or ground-based navaids like VORs. We don’t have a single threat point that anyone could attack.”