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A comment on Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on April 11. Parent comment

Re:Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on ... by pavel_lishin on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @03:51PM (#11491615)
> hacking into commercial airliners auto-pilot systems, and directing dozens of flights onto a target.

I would imagine that any pilot would figure out what was going on, unless it was on an incredibly foggy day.

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Re:Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on ... by blackflame7000 on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @04:12PM (#11491782)
It's Hollywood, name one movie where the villain did not disable the manual override. That's villainy 101.
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Re:Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on ... by pavel_lishin on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @04:37PM (#11491991)
Sure, but rayval was talking about a scenario that could happen today.

Although looking at the other comments, I think I'm significantly underestimating just how much of modern airliners is dependent on software. The pilots might be able to see that they're heading for disaster, but may not be able to do anything about it.

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Re:Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on ... by blackflame7000 on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @05:12PM (#11492260)
I know for a fact that there are 3 separate computer systems from 3 separate manufacturers on each Boeing airplane. Auto-pilot always uses the consensus of the 3 machines. It's a pretty far-fetched scenario in real life so I thought we were talking fiction.
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Re:Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on ... by coredog64 on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @09:39PM (#11493752)
Former Boeing software engineer, worked on engineering simulators (where real hardware was in the loop):

There is an idea of triple channel autolanding, wherein the plane uses the consensus of the three autolanding systems. Should no consensus be available, then the pilot is advised that autolanding is not available.

Other than that, any sourcing from different manufacturers is happenstance. 737 avionics are sourced from a different vendor than 747/757/767/777. And different functions can come from different vendors, although vendor consolidation has cut down on that.

I'm not across what happened post 777, as I left Boeing in 1999.

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