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Navigation may be defined as the movement of a vehicle from one place to another. "That could have easily been several hours and then we would have been into flight delays for days because of the ripple effects.Air navigation is defined as "the process of determining the geographic position and maintaining the desired direction of an aircraft relative to the surface of the earth "We were completely shut down and 46 minutes later we were back up and running," Pair said. Nate Pair, president of the Los Angeles Center for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said it was remarkable that ERAM was restored less than an hour after the outage, limiting the effect on travelers. "It's very over-budget and behind schedule, so it doesn't surprise me that it's got some bugs - it's the way it presented itself" that's alarming, Moss said.īut air traffic controllers and pilots said ERAM is a vast improvement over past systems and that it is needed to fit growing plane traffic into the airspace safely. Moss said many hackers have been studying aspects of a new $40 billion air traffic control system, known as NextGen, which encompasses ERAM, including its reliance on Global Positioning System data that could be faked.Īt least two talks at this summer's Def Con will look at potential weaknesses in the system. "This is part of the downside of automation." "It's certainly possible that there are other forms of flight plans that could cause similar or even worse effects," Kaminsky said. "If it's now understood that there are flight plans that cause the automated system to fail, then the flight plan is an 'attack surface,'" said Dan Kaminsky, co-founder of the White Ops security firm and an expert in attacks based on over-filling areas of computer memory. Read More Feds warn pilots not to land at wrong airport Though they welcomed the FAA's assurance that a fix was being rolled out, they said the incident suggested that similar failures could be found.

While it might be logical to limit the amount of data associated with one flight plan, anything exceeding that amount should not be able to render the system useless, they said. "That's when you put in values anywhere that a human could put in a number, like minus one feet, or a million feet, to see what that would do," said Jeff Moss, founder of the Black Hat and Def Con security conferences and an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security. Security experts said that from the description by insiders, the failure appeared to have been made possible by the sort of routine programming mistake that should have been identified in testing before it was deployed. "It would be hard to replicate by a hostile government, but it shows a very basic limitation of the system," said a former military and commercial pilot.Ĭyber-attacks on aviation have been an area of increased concern for intelligence officials, who said earlier this year they will set up a new center in Maryland for sharing information on detected and possible threats. The sources said the circumstances would be difficult for an attacker to mimic, since they involved a complex flight plan, an altitude discrepancy and an input from the controller that added to the flight plan data.įormer military and commercial pilots said flight plans are generally carefully checked and manually entered into the air traffic control computers, which are owned by the FAA. "It keeps failing itself because it's exceeded the limit of what it can do." "The system is only designed to take so much data per airplane," one of the sources said. The conflict generated error messages and caused the system to begin cycling through restarts.

While a controller entered the usual altitude for a U-2 plane-about 60,000 feet-the system began to consider all altitudes between ground level and infinity. The flight plan did not contain an altitude for the flight, one of the sources said. Read More Renovation plans in the works for Biden's 'worst airport' The plan showed the plane going in and out of the Los Angeles control area multiple times, not a simple point-to-point route like most flights, they said. Most planes have simple flight plans, so they do not exceed that limit.īut a U-2 operating at high altitude that day had a complex flight plan that put it close to the system's limit, the sources said. The ERAM system failed because it limits how much data each plane can send it, according to the sources. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit