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Comment by _audakel | Hacker News Reader

I was worried you where going to say it took the plane offline

This reminds me of the (possibly urban legend) story of the F-16 navigation system that turned upside down on crossing the equator.

https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3.44.html

There is another one that is not an urban legend, in 2007 a group of six F-22 completely lost their navigation and partially lost communication when crossing the international date line. They had to visually follow their tankers back to Hawaii.

http://www.dailytech.com/Lockheeds+F22+Raptor+Gets+Zapped+by...

Pretty certain this isn't an urban legend. I was stationed at Hahn in 1983, the first base in USAFE to get the F-16, and it was related to the troops by a General Dynamics technical guy. This was found in the simulator during testing, and the pilot had flown south of the equator and the plane inverted. He said "Huh, that's strange." and flew back into the northern hemisphere, and the plane corrected itself.

Would the speed of the inversion have killed a pilot? That wasn't mentioned, but given that humans have different G tolerances depending on the direction ... maybe.

There was that story a year or two ago about someone who took control of a plane through the in flight entertainment systems. I don't know if it was scare mongering or not but you'd expect that the entertainment system and flight control computers were on separate networks.... wouldn't you?

I don't just expect them to be on separate networks - I expect them to be fully air-gapped!

Entertainment systems typically can show flight info. They receive it through something like ARINC one-way serial link.

Air-gapped might get in trouble too in case of depressurization. It'll be almost vacuum gapped then.

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