Various overrides of the flight control system can prevent even a determined pilot from crashing an aircraft into a specific ground target. The technologies already in development for aviation safety purposes can be adopted for security applications as well.

Technology can be refined to create a "refuse-to-crash aircraft." An automatic ground collision avoidance system, now an active project of the automobile industry, combined with aircraft control, can be applied to commercial airplanes for unusual attitude recovery and ground collision avoidance. The national and worldwide terrain/obstacle database, already under development by a number of organizations, can be extended to identify protective shells, or prohibited airspace, around selected areas such as specific high-risk facilities. The algorithms in the collision avoidance system could interpret these protected areas as hard terrain and force the aircraft to avoid them.

Advanced autopilot, similar to the controls currently used in unmanned surveillance aircraft, can serve as a security backup. In the event of an emergency, or unauthorized deviation, manual flight controls could be disabled by a signal from the pilot or from ground controllers and allow automated safe flight to the nearest secure airport.

An aircraft damaged by a terrorist attack or system failure could, in many cases, be landed safely through the use of reconfigurable flight controls, a technology that has been demonstrated and is based on work by NASA, DOD, FAA, and the aerospace industry, to compensate for damaged or failed systems.

Potentially threatening deviations from the flight paths can be automatically brought to the attention of ground controllers. Such anomaly detection requires the use of an advanced alerting system, capable of assessing the probability that an aircraft is under malign control or the probability of a collision with some object or place. The system would build on existing efforts to develop airspace flow control automation, visualize air traffic patterns, and quantify aviation safety risk by monitoring and modeling air traffic patterns.

Linking passenger cabins and flight stations with ground communication networks into an integrated information environment can enable safety—or potential security—issues to be uncovered during a flight.

The use of biometric technologies (including fingerprint sensors, retinal scans, and facial recognition systems) for verification and identification can ensure that flight controls are used only by authorized pilots.

Enhanced airport and aircraft security can be achieved by using a multilayered suite of trace-detection and active imaging technologies. Examples of instruments using these technologies are compact trace gas analyzers, biosensors, high-tech systems to detect molecular-level evidence of explosives and firearms, and high-speed, low-cost 3-D imaging technologies integrated with better information technology databases and decision support systems, such as automated pattern recognition devices.

These instruments could enable the implementation of a central security screening at a check-in location, and a distributed, roving security detection system that encompasses the total airport environment and individual aircraft. Linkage of various distributed information databases could enable near real-time identification of potential passenger threats.

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