Reminder: This Is the 3rd Time in a Month Airline Fleets Have Been Grounded

Today, UNITED AIRLINES GROUNDED all its domestic flights over an “automation issue” with its computer system. United had to ground its domestic fleet last month, too. Passengers aboard affected flights indicated then that it had to do with bad flight plans being automatically uploaded to pilots. Then later in June, a Polish Airline was hit with what seemed like the exact same problem.

No word yet on whether today’s automation issue is also related to flights plans, but as our coverage of the earlier instances suggests, the universal flight-plan protocol is an easy target for tampering.

Here are our full stories on those earlier groundings .... http://www.wired.com