Was the world’s second-largest airline grounded for nearly an hour Tuesday morning by a hacker?  Probably not. But that was the immediate suspicion after Chicago-based United Airlines began experiencing significant problems with its flight dispatch system around 8 a.m. CT.  The Federal Aviation Administration quickly issued a ground stop, effectively shutting down the airline’s more than 700 jets (except, of course, those already in the air). The ground stop order was lifted about 40 minutes later.  Wired.com and other media outlets quickly posted online news stories about the event in which they quoted Tweets and other social media postings from passengers stuck onboard grounded United planes. Though all those early reports cautiously added that the actual cause of the dispatch system disruption remained unknown, at least to the website editors – they speculated that United’s system had been hacked into by outsiders.  And given both the nature of the tweets and other social media comments quoted in those stories, and given recent reporting about hackers attacking airline systems, it’s easy to understand why the speculation went so aggressively in that direction.  Ted Benson, a stranded United passenger tweeted, “Sitting on runway. Pilot inferring #UnitedAirlines has grounded all flights due to possible hack: fake flight plans found in system.”  Twenty-one minutes later he tweeted again: “engines just spun up again so maybe resolved? Pilot said flight plan system had been spitting out “random plans over and over”.”  And Benson was far from the only passenger passing on such random bits of news and speculation. And that fed into the growing, media-fed impression that airlines increasingly are being targeted by hackers out to either prove their skills or do actual harm to companies and, potentially, people.
It's possible that a hacker could tap into an airline's flight dispatch system, as has been speculated in this case. The more important question is what harm could result from an airline’s dispatch system being hacked? And the answer to that question – for now, at least – is probably not much.