K.C.'s Garage

The video of my DEFCON 17 talk has been uploaded to VIMEO, in case you want to see it: Old Skool Brought Back: A 1964 Modem Demo on Vimeo . Thanks to Jason Scott of Textfiles.com .

So, as I am writing this, the FAA's Air Traffic Control system is down. More specifically, it has been reported that the computer systems responsible for automated processing of flight plans is down. As such, Air Traffic Controllers are having to enter flight plans one at a time manually for each flight before departure. This is having predictably catastrophic effects on the flow of traffic out of busy airports like ATL. Interestingly, four months ago a presenter at DEFCON 17 named Righter Kunkel gave a presentation on how antiquated and potentially insecure the FAA's system - specifically the system for processing flight plans - was.   He pointed out that anyone with very little information could easily flood the system with thousands of bogus flight plans and cause chaos. That talk was published on the web, publicly, a few days ago. So, is this what happened?   Naturally, we'll probably never know.  It might be that, it might be an unrelated failure, it might be that t...

I created an Excel worksheet for easily computing, charting, and printing the weight & balance for my aircraft, based on an older version that I had found on the net somewhere. The values are specific to my aircraft, but the spreadsheet should be really easy to modify for other similar model Cessna 172 aircraft. The spreadsheet includes a simple macro to make printing the worksheet portion easy. If you get the "Macros Enabled" warning, that is why. To download, click the image: Enjoy!