4.

Tech-based threats
• Multiple airlines suffered data breaches affecting hundreds of thousands
of customers. Such breaches are liable to have a particular impact owing
to the sensitive personal data stored by airlines, including customer
payment and passport details.
• Remediation costs for protecting affected customers can be high, as is the
potential for regulatory fines. Because of the value of this, aviation
businesses are lucrative targets for cybercriminals seeking financial gain.
• Cyber threat to flight operations which in result affecting airports,
including drones and flight display screens going offline.
• This illustrates that the digital ecosystem of the aviation sector has
multiple points of failure.
• It will be imperative for the aviation sector to cooperate with regulatory
and law enforcement bodies to establish preventative measures and
procedures for quick reactions if other drone incidents occur.
 A holistic approach
• The key to understanding and mitigating geopolitical
risks is a holistic view of the risk landscape.
• By analyzing operating contexts through multiple lenses
– such as people, business resilience, investment, cyber,
reputation, and climate and environment – a whole
spectrum of interrelated risks become visible.
• There is no one solution that helps mitigate these risks,
but they instead require an integrated response and a
reminder that threats emanate from having a capability,
an intention or motive – and an opportunity.
Aviation Despite setbacks, aviation is changing fast
• On march 10th a Boeing 737 max, the latest version of that firm’s bestselling narrow-
bodied airliner, fell from the sky in Ethiopia. All 157 souls on board were lost. This
followed the crash off the coast of Java, less than five months earlier, of another
737 max. The death toll then was 189.
• Reasons for Crash
⁻ Faulty sensor feeding false data to an avionic flight-management system that had new software
which pilots had not been briefed about.
⁻ Flight-management system insisted on overriding the actions of the pilots, who did not know
how to respond. This precipitated a stall rather than, as intended, preventing one.
⁻ To keep things as they were, and avoid pilots having to recertify to fly the new version, its
avionic software was tweaked to make the new plane’s trim feel, to a pilot, like the old plane’s.
That would have been fine as long as the sensors feeding information to those avionics worked
properly and the pilots themselves knew what was going on. But they did not.
• The case of the 737 max is an extreme example of conservatism at work in aircraft
design.
• These two tragedies illuminate the tension between conservatism and innovation that
lies at the heart of civil-aviation technology.
• It must continue to balance conservatism and innovation.