Return to Virginia Business - September 2002

by Robert Burke

In The planes on Christine Belcastro’s computer screen aren’t real, but it is still chilling to watch them fall from the sky. In video simulations, they flip and spin and tumble helplessly until, miraculously, they right themselves, saved only by a string of computer code.

That code is what Belcastro and a team of aviation-safety researchers have been developing at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton for the past few years. They’ve imagined every kind of bad scenario and written a program, dubbed “refuse to crash” technology, that could take control and save even a damaged plane from crashing. “We have it in the lab,” says Belcastro. “We’re still trying to work the kinks out.”

The scenario they didn’t imagine, though, happened last Sept. 11 when terrorists seized control of four commercial airliners. The consequent attacks in New York and at the Pentagon rocked the airline industry and made Langley’s safety experts — who had been focused on preventing accidents — start thinking about ways to stop future attacks.

Their strongest weapon so far is a computerized refuse-to-crash concept — one often publicly touted by NASA brass. But morphing it from a tool to help pilots to one that could outfight a determined terrorist is a huge challenge. “The technology is there, but the operational issues are tremendous,” says John White, who runs Langley’s single-aircraft accident prevention program. “You’re talking about taking control away from the pilot. We’re not there yet in terms of how you would actually implement that.”

Nonetheless, Langley is going to try, and in the process will be adding an anti-terror initiative to its mission. What this means for Langley’s budget or its 3,800 employees, however, isn’t clear. NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe has told Langley staffers that they’ll be part of the anti-terror effort, but they don’t know yet if that means more money or more people. The agency will undoubtedly overlap with the Federal Aviation Administration and the newly formed Transportation Security Administration, which is hustling now to hire baggage screeners nationwide. Other than the refuse-to-crash idea, Langley researchers aren’t saying — and probably aren’t sure — what they’ll be working on. “Some of it depends on what’s doable,” says Langley spokeswoman Kathy Barnstorff. “And we of course never operate in a vacuum. We try to do research that’s going to be applied somewhere.”

NASA has done that many times. Langley developed the “glass cockpit” technology, for example, that replaces the old mechanical dials and gauges with color flat-panel screens, and Boeing uses it in its new 777 commercial aircraft. Langley works with private-sector aeronautics firms on research in areas such as weather monitoring, preventing runway accidents and aircraft design. NASA and Boeing are working jointly on this security system as well, cosponsoring a study this summer that asked whether flight systems could be hardened against sabotage. The answer was a qualified yes, White says. “If you have an unsophisticated pilot, one who does not know about the systems, in terms of what circuit breaker to pull, et cetera, you could counter him.” Is a terrorist-proof plane even possible? White hedges his bet. “Ultimately I have to believe if a pilot is going to crash the airplane, he can do it. But what we can do is prevent him from using the airplane as a smart bomb. We could make it so difficult to do it that they’d look for other means.”

Still, White says, it is possible for planes to fly themselves. Flight computers can use Global Positioning System data to know where they are and could even perform landings. Or, it could be done by remote control from the ground. The idea of automating some of these functions has been explored for a number of years in the industry; there are systems that warn pilots when they are too close to the ground or to another aircraft. Belcastro says the U.S. military has tested a system that makes low-flying jets pull up if they get too close to the ground. The system was put in some F-16 fighters for tests in California “and the pilots loved it,” she says.

That system, though, involved a willing crew and was used on just a single kind of aircraft. If such a system were to be put to widespread use in commercial aviation it would have to be adaptable to many different kinds of airplanes and situations. In fact, a recent FAA report on potential anti-terror systems threw cold water on the idea of putting a refuse-to-crash system on commercial airliners: Too complicated, too expensive to retrofit on older planes and ineffective because well-funded terrorist groups like al-Qaida could simply buy a plane without it. “None of these concepts, including the refuse-to-crash type, is a potential near-term intervention,” said the study, which was lead by Herman Rediess, director of the FAA’s Office of Aviation Research. “Airlines are in no financial condition to make required modifications...”

Plus there’s the issue of timing. The FAA can take up to five years or more to certify a new system for use on aircraft, says spokesman Les Dorr. Nobody is close to even submitting it for review. Short-term solutions are both faster and easier. The FAA announced in May it would spend $97 million to reinforce the cockpit doors, with the work to be done by April 2003.

Along with the technical hurdles of modifying flight controls, pilots may not want the technology. “Traditionally most pilots are reluctant to fly with anything that takes the control away from them,” Dorr says. The major pilots union would rather arm pilots now and let them take care of business. In late July, Stephen Luckey, a representative of the Air Line Pilots Association, a union representing 6,700 pilots, told a U.S. Senate panel that “No one is more highly qualified for protecting the flight deck than pilots.”

Uncertainty about the technology today isn’t affecting what Belcastro and White and others are doing. They are still developing the refuse-to-crash system as a safety device, a kind of “panic button” for pilots. They’ve done wind-tunnel tests with a model of a 757 aircraft, and are using the data to learn how planes respond in “unusual attitudes” such as a 90-degree roll. Eventually they’ll test the program on a remote-controlled model. The results of those experiments will help them develop a simulator for training crews as well as refine the system for eventual use in flight computers.

Though it is part of the space program, Langley has a long history in civil aeronautics. Its 800-acre campus is mostly nondescript brick buildings and a few bulbous-looking structures that house its wind tunnels, plus a giant hangar built around 1950. It was actually founded in 1915 and was folded into NASA when the agency was formed in 1958. Today it’s part of a public-private network of aviation research and development, working cooperatively with both the FAA and key industry players such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin. The aviation safety research, just one part of Langley’s aviation program, was launched in 1997 with a goal of reducing the fatal aircraft accident rate by 80 percent in 10 years and 90 percent in 25 years.
Those are laudable goals, to be sure. But few things would make the skies safer than finding a way to keep planes from being used as missiles. If terrorists ever proved strong enough to beat reinforced cockpits and armed pilots, it would be nice to make them tangle with a really smart plane.

Return to Virginia Business -September 2002