I must admit, some secret part of me always hopes I'll be in a situation on an airplane where they need an emergency perl script written . . .
On a flight from Sydney to Vancouver earlier this year, the in-flight entertainment system on my plane was broken. I spoke up: "Hi, I have a doctorate in computer science and I know a bit about these systems... want me to take a look?"
I was surprised when they agreed, brought me up to the front galley, and showed me their interface to the entertainment system (alas, the server itself was in the ceiling and not accessible). I ended up pulling out my laptop, borrowing a cat5 cable from one of the flight attendants (all of mine were in my checked suitcase) and running tcpdump on the plane's network. Alas, while that allowed me to diagnose the problem, I lacked the serial cable needed to connect to the server's console and wasn't able to fix it.
I considered sending DHCP responses to the server myself, but decided that injecting traffic would be too risky during flight... especially since I was flying back from a conference where one of the speakers had been talking about inadequate firewalling between IFE systems and aeronautical control systems.
How is this possible? Why do they even need to be on the same network?
Furthermore, the IFE might not need to talk to critical control systems, but they both might need to talk to some of the same other systems. Cabin lights seem like a likely candidate. Displays for the pilot, too. And maybe maintenance fault logs.
It can be a real hassle to have totally isolated systems on different networks. You can do it, but you need a Good Reason. The easy thing, from an engineering perspective, is to make it so everything can talk to everything.
One of the top 5 questions you don't want to hear over the loudspeaker while flying on a supersonic jet.
There was never any problem with the flight, and he never found out what happened. Probably something like the co-pilot had a problem that prevented them from continuing to act as the co-pilot, and they wanted to maintain sufficient redundancy just in case.
Why would electrical engineers fly to a conference on a Concorde? What good would an aeronautical engineer be _in flight_?
> "Why would electrical engineers fly to a conference on a Concorde?"
The airline was moving a Concorde to a different facility (ie, it wasn't part of regular scheduled service). They decided to "upgrade" a bunch of passengers who were scheduled to be on a different type of aircraft. They moved the whole group of engineers together.
The stewardess asked for a "Concorde engineer", who was needed for after landing. It had something to do with the way the Concorde hooks up to the loading bridge at the terminal (it may have something to do with the unusual height of Concorde?)