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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

What keeps the highly regulated world of aircraft from adopting a semi-public registry* of all relevant airplanes and all their parts + part history?

There apparently is only a ridiculously small number of 40.000** different airplanes in the world! This database would fit on a single hard drive.

* did someone say blockchain? (Planes and all their components could be NFT mintable by component producers) (I am a blockchain hater but here it really fits!)

** https://www.travelweek.ca/news/exactly-many-planes-world-tod...

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No, blockchain still doesn't fit, because there's no reason to allow random keypairs to write to the network. The condition for writing to the database is whether your key is on a list of real vendors; the whole hashing/longest chain dance is superfluous.

Merkel trees with restricted access are probably the more applicable notion here.

E.g., what most Free Software development uses.

I like how OP jumps from “highly regulated world of aircraft” to a solution with zero regulation.

Imagine being on a sinking ship and the captain is all; don’t worry, if we tie this life jacket to the handrail, it’ll stop the descent by floating on top of the water.

IT has been taken over by the rent seeking industrial complex. Peddling hallucination to prop up book sales and conference travel.

I dont know why we are even bringing IT into the A&P world other than dissemination of maintenance data. Aircraft maintenance has been well documented for almost a century now. The issue is incorporating other entities before they are vetted for corruption. This is a sad state of affairs. Edit: thinking about that, planes crash all the time but it is rare, but non-zero, due to maintenance

Blockchains can be public or private (i.e. restricted access). In this case, the latter would be appropriate. There are also ways of signing records to establish that a known company produced them.

The idea behind using blockchain for tracking provenance is that you can check if a widget with unique serial number number X has been produced, who currently possesses it, and whether it has already been used. It would also be possible for each manufacturer to maintain their own record, so blockchain is not the only solution, but it is a fairly good fit to this particular problem. As with manufacturers maintaining ownership records, it cannot absolutely prevent a counterfeit part being used, but since the part would have to come from the company who was the last holder of record for a specific genuine part, and the record for that genuine part would be marked as "consumed", normally there would be no financial motive to supply a counterfeit. (Supply to Russia might be a an exception).

Yea but then we need another crypto block chain that validated whether a component producer is a real component producer;)

I'm serious though. There are a lot of aerospace manufacturers, even small mom and pop machine shops that take orders for parts but they do comply with the paperwork regulation.

So who or what regulates who can produce?

Is the block chain also going to sit in the factory to ensure that after the initial components, that the company doesn't bait and switch to non compliance and fake the paperwork?

That's why ultimately the final arbiter here is the law, and prison. Even though the lowest level of paper trail was forged, the rest of the documentation exists and the fraudster are facing a giant world of hurt, and prison.

Ultimately there are counterfeit parts installed in planes that fly passengers. The goal should be to keep counterfeit parts out of the plane. United installed counterfeit parts because their supplier handed them a document claiming the parts were from GE. GE disavowed the parts much later. Clearly a focus on law and prison didn’t work in this case to keep these parts out of the plane. Maybe another system of attestation would do a better job.

General solution isn't exactly possible, but some specific supply chains like F-35 use hashed merkle trees for tracking lifecycle of parts (specifically, KSI system most well known from e-Estonia work).

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