TCAS being Hacked?
Added 2025-09-26 16:15:26 +0000 UTCHello everyone,
Here is another early access preview to the upcoming Mentour Now! video releasing on Monday. We hope you all enjoy it and have a fantastic weekend!
Let us know what you think.
The Mentour Team
Comments
TBH i’m surprised this flaw hasn’t been exploited so far. Aviation is very complacent in terms of IT security. All trusted signals from outside the plane should be encrypted and signed. Given what Russia is willing to do, this (and GPS spoofing) should be fixed ASAP (and should have been fixed decades ago). I understand there are concerns with encryption and signing algorithms in terms of the demand they put on the outdated CPUs used in aviation, but it’s unacceptable that aviation still lives in the 1940’s.
Thomas Charbonnel
2025-09-30 13:00:18 +0000 UTCDear Peter, Dear Team, Great video as always. I would like to highlight that the information that triggers the TCAS alerts is only based on transponder data. It is worth mentioning in the video that in order to get a TCAS warning you need to have TCAS system only in one of the aircrafts involved and at least mode C transponder in both. I can say from experience that I had on several occasions TCAS RA`s with VFR traffic that is equipped only with mode C transponder. I have seen as well mode A transponder indications on my ND coming from marine traffic which again can cause TA if these are close enough. So all in all the TCAS just uses the data from the transponders and triggers the alert, but is not the system that is handling the communication between aircrafts. I think it is worth clarifying this for the public to get a more clear picture if the cause of these false warning and cautions. Thank you again for the great work!
adrian selivestrov
2025-09-28 08:10:06 +0000 UTC
