Here's another quick item I can take six minutes to post while still in article-deadline-hell mode. It's a warning, from a computer-security conference in Amsterdam, that hackers equipped merely with Android phones could remotely take control of an airliner and guide it in all sorts of unwelcome ways, including right into another plane. As in the classic pilot-world joke photoshopped item above.
You can see the whole scenario described at Computerworld, but here is the crucial passage, with my emphasis added at the end:
Once [the hacker with an Android] was into the airplane's computer, he was able to manipulate the steering of a Boeing jet while the aircraft was in "autopilot" mode. The only countermeasure available to pilots, if they even realized they were being hacked, would be to turn off autopilot. Yet many planes no longer have old analog instruments for manual flying.
Two words: Unt. Uh.
Let's set aside the "if" of whether pilots would notice that the plane was going where it shouldn't. True, there have been cases of flight crews losing attention while talking or even dozing off en route. But most flight crews most of the time are tracking the plane's progress along a series of waypoints, and talking to air traffic controllers about where they're going and why.
Instead, these two issues:
1) You don't need instruments to control a plane. That is like saying you need a speedometer to drive a car. Obviously you want all the info you can get, and in an airplane the airspeed gauge in particular is very important (mainly in gauging proper speeds for approach and landing, in flap deployment, and in avoiding aerodynamic stalls). But even basic pilot training includes drills in how to control the plane if instruments fail. There's a special case we can set aside for the moment: the difficulty of controlling the plane if you are inside a cloud and lose the instruments that keep your oriented.
2) Every non-drone airplane flying anywhere in the sky is equipped for "manual flying." That is how they all get off the ground, with some pilot applying the power, pulling back on the control wheel/stick, and managing the "rotation" as the plane lifts off from the runway. This is how planes usually land. Every single airplane -- every one -- is equipped with systems to allow the pilot to bring it back to earth if all the automated wizardry fails. Every pilot is made to practice these emergency measures. Again to put it in automotive terms: imagining that you could not fly the plane, if you turned off the autopilot, is exactly like saying that you could not drive a car if you turned off cruise-control.
The Android-hacking scenario might apply to drones -- I don't know enough about the override abilities the ground-based human pilots. (After all, the controller and the hacker would both be sending commands remotely.) But I can tell you that no one with an Android is going to make it impossible for a pilot to land any of today's real planes.
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