<< Back in the Great Empire

2002 > November

"If the sharks don't get us, the fear factor will" >>

Tuesday, 19 November 2002

Airline computer systems vulnerable? ::

Coincidence and paranoid speculation? Warning signals of certain computer systems being probed for vulnerability? Symptoms of government computer programmers frantically trying to debug new code?

1. The British Airways checkin system at SFO was down for hours the evening of Fri 8 Nov, resulting in a 747 full of passengers being checked in using paper and pen. Perhaps we sat at the gate for two hours after the doors were closed not because “air traffic control has for some reason not accepted our flight plan” (according to the pilot’s announcement) but because they were manually entering the passenger list into an FBI computer?
2. On Sat 9 Nov, mid-afternoon, British passport control at Heathrow’s computer systems were down when the same flight’s passengers were arriving.
3. Last night, Air Canada’s checkin system in Vancouver went down in the middle of checking me in. The frustrated agent told me it had been doing this all day. I told him about incident 1, thinking it would make him feel better, that it could be worse. The agent next to him said that they’d had to check in a whole flight using manual procedures a week earlier. I then mentioned incident 2, and a look of concern crossed his face as he said, “that means that if there were a flag on your passport, they wouldn’t be able to tell.”

References:
More on airline checkin systems ( 2 December 2002)

<< Back in the Great Empire

2002 > November

"If the sharks don't get us, the fear factor will" >>

---