FAA Computer Glitch Causes Widespread Airline Delays 133
seven of five writes with this excerpt from an Associated Press report: "A problem with the FAA system that collects airlines' flight plans caused widespread flight cancellations and delays nationwide Thursday. It was the second time in 15 months that a glitch in the flight plan system caused delays. The FAA said in a statement that it is having a problem processing flight plan information. 'We are investigating the cause of the problem,' the agency said. 'We are processing flight plans manually and expect some delays. We have radar coverage and communications with planes.'"
what do you expect from 70's technology ?? (Score:2, Informative)
Resolved... (Score:3, Informative)
...according to the Wall Street Journal. [wsj.com] Wonder if they'll give me a lift home?
Re:Hmm could it be a windows problem? - of course! (Score:1, Informative)
Link to deployment announcement about "modernization" of airspace network.
http://www.stratus.com/news/2005/20050314a.htm [stratus.com]
Re:Yep... (Score:4, Informative)
I just read a post on Facebook by an Air traffic controller I know. They had to e-mail or fax all icao [wikipedia.org] flight plans to the FAA [wikipedia.org]. The FAA manually typed in every flight plan for every flight in the country.
Already fixed before it even got posted on /. (Score:3, Informative)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125863837097855555.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories [wsj.com]
Re:problems? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, this is flight planning/scheduling software. This is the system by which airliners are told what route they are to take when they finally get their flight clearance.
The primary reason this has not received "oh my god the sky is falling" priority is because, well, it isn't. Nor are shiny metal tubes blasting through the sky at 500 miles an hour going to smash into each other because of this. People will be inconvenienced and that's regrettable and needs to be fixed, but this is not a safety issue.
- Radar control systems: Unaffected.
- Air Traffic control: Unaffected.
- Communications: Unaffected.
- Landings: Unaffected.
- Any flights already in progress: Unaffected.
- Ground control: Unaffected.
- Passenger Safety: Unaffected.
This only delays the granting of flight clearance. The planes that are inconvenienced by this are safely on the ground, and the effect is that they stay on the ground longer than they should. Again, this is regrettable, but not fatal. There is no plausible scenario that would lead from this to a failure of traffic control. In fact, with fewer planes in the sky, you could argue that flying is actually safer (for those people who are lucky enough to have gotten clearance, of course!).
In the medical field, this would be a failure of the system that the receptionist uses to schedule your next appointment. In the automotive analogy, this would be a failure of your garage door opener. In the heart monitor analogy, there isn't even an analogy because heart monitors don't have (as far as I know) any non-critical systems.
Re:problems? (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that this did not affect the development of flight plans, only delayed them, I'd rip this back out of the category of "safety critical".
Online development of flight plans is much faster than offline. But that's precisely what makes the offline ones safe - as you delay the development of flight plans you also reduce the number of planes being cleared for takeoff at the same time. Once the flight planning software goes back online, you can start granting flight plans quickly again and get traffic volumes back to normal.
And it's a bit of a stretch to assume a risk of a collision even in the complete absence of flight planning. ATC, Radar, airplane internal collision avoidance, and pilot eyeballs are all unaffected by this. The only thing this could possibly do is put two planes in the vicinity of each other, but even that is unlikely as the sky isn't "the wild west" - it's carved up into clearly-defined highways with speed limits and defined routes which are all used in flight planning. So if you have two planes in the vicinity of each other, they are going in the same direction at roughly the same speed, so there's TONS of time to react.
And the first precaution, as we've seen here, is to reduce the number of clearances. Arguably, this makes the actual flying safer, since there are fewer planes up there for ATC to have to track and communicate with.
Re:problems? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hmm could it be a windows problem? - of course! (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I work w/ the FAA right now, and they're becoming relatively platform agnostic actually. ERAM [wikipedia.org], for instance, was written by Lockheed Martin to run on top of some flavor of IBM UNIX or Linux (forget which). In the old days, everything ran on custom, purpose-built hardware and OSes, but that really turned out to be a maintenance nightmare. Using COTS Hardware/Software means upgrading systems or providing new capabilities can be pretty easy.
I think ASDE-X [wikipedia.org] runs on top of some sort of POSIX type OS as well... I know its data stream is standard UDP over Ethernet type stuff.