Modern aircraft and the systems that support them are less mechanical than data ecosystems: flight management systems, electronic flight bags, maintenance telemetry, ground dispatch, and passenger apps all exchange data continuously. That connectivity brings efficiency — and a new set of silent risks I call “ghost airplanes”: compromised or spoofed digital objects in the aviation stack that look legitimate to systems but are controlled or corrupted by attackers.

Ghost airplanes can be fake flight plans injected into scheduling systems, spoofed ADS-B feeds that misrepresent aircraft positions, corrupted maintenance logs that hide failing components, or compromised Electronic Flight Bags that deliver tampered charts to pilots. The impact is not just theoretical. Attacks can degrade situational awareness, create routing confusion, or trigger emergency responses that cost time and lives. Attack vectors vary: insecure vendor portals, outdated ground-station software, poorly segmented maintenance networks, and third-party telemetry providers are common entry points. In one plausible scenario, an attacker who compromises a ground maintenance API could inject a false “all clear” status into several aircraft records, bypassing routine checks and creating cascading mechanical risk.

Another scenario involves compromised airport Wi-Fi and passenger apps used to phish crew credentials, then leveraging those credentials to access flight planning systems. Aviation’s regulatory and cultural constraints complicate fixes: long equipment lifecycles, stringent certification processes, and an emphasis on availability over security create inertia. Addressing ghost airplanes requires industry-level changes: strict network segmentation between operational and business networks, cryptographic signing of telemetry and maintenance records (so data provenance can be validated end-to-end), continuous device inventory and attestation for avionics and ground equipment, and resilient fallback procedures that assume digital inputs can be malicious.

Cross-industry exercises that simulate ghost scenarios — involving airlines, ATC, OEMs, and regulators — can surface gaps and refine manual overrides. The bottom line: the aviation sector must treat digital artifacts with the same skepticism it treats physical maintenance — because a fake data feed can be as dangerous as a faulty engine.