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Comments: 133 +- Technology: FAA Computer Glitch Causes Widespread Airline Delays on Thursday November 19, @10:42AM
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by
Soulskill
on Thursday November 19, @10:42AM
from the reports-confirm-toothpaste-was-not-involved dept.
from the reports-confirm-toothpaste-was-not-involved dept.
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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.'"
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Here I sit... (Score:3, Interesting)
...stuck in Atlanta...
Re:Here I sit... (Score:4, Funny)
It could be worse. You could be stuck in Lodi (again).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry to hear that. But, as the old saying goes, "it's better to be DOWN HERE desperately wishing you were UP THERE, than UP THERE desperately wishing you were DOWN HERE."
Damn Excel (Score:4, Funny)
Some one messed up their $2,000,000 excel macro that list morning.
Honest! (Score:5, Funny)
I only changed one little line of code! It wasn't even important enough to test!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
HAHAH, around my work you could add "or Document" to the end of that statement. I cant count the number of times people have changed things with no documentation and they did not consider it important.
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Document? I don't understand. What is "Document"?
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I think it's a Microsoft product. That's why not many around here use it.
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No you see the problem was that someone tried to comment out a comment. However, their skewed vision on how comments work, and by some MIRACLE of programming and compilation, All the code ended up commented and the comment was compiled instead.
what do you expect from 70's technology ?? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:what do you expect from 70's technology ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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This brings up the greater question of how old must a technology be before it is considered mature enough for purposes as mission-critical as air planes. 5 years? 10 years? 20?
I think that reasonably, you ought to be able to trust technology that's been around for a decade.
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They are also phasing in more GPS approaches (nav systems specifically designed for landing) and phasing out the NDBs (non-directional beacon) and taking failing VORs out of service that are often used at fields which have (ILS) instrument approach runways.
That said, it is a very slow process. If your car's speedo goes out, who cares. If the
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C++ stripped to essentially C may have hidden problems
That sounds about right, yeah.
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They are comfortable running systems on ancient mainframes running ULTRA.
I would be comfortable doing the same thing.
Why do people shit on mainframes? They may cost a lot of money and time, but they're orders of magnitude more dependable than any other server solution that exists.
Yes, that includes the "cloud".
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Resolved... (Score:3, Informative)
...according to the Wall Street Journal. [wsj.com] Wonder if they'll give me a lift home?
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All true, but note line 1 of TFA:
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Even if it's fixed, there will still be delays for a while. There are probably tons of flights that are still awaiting clearance and the requests are being dealt with as quickly as safely possible. Meanwhile, a normal load of requests is still coming in, and those go into queue as well.
Trouble with things like flight planning is that they are, well, planning. If they go down, the manual process can't keep up with the load, and a queue develops. Once the system comes back up, it's gotta munge through the
Maybe it's like the internet... (Score:2)
Already fixed before it even got posted on /. (Score:3, Informative)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125863837097855555.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories [wsj.com]
To quote some technology middle manager (Score:4, Funny)
"That's it, you're all grounded!"
Glitch is now fixed (Score:3, Funny)
Apparently they fixed the glitch so the problem worked itself out naturally.
Foot TCP (Score:2, Insightful)
We all know how large out of touch behemoths sometimes structure their IT. By 'packet switch' they mean 'guy who couriers hardcopy flight plans' and by 'database mistmatch' they mean their dewey-decimal-system was mixed-up by some jokesters.
Honest... (Score:5, Funny)
**ducks**
Just another great goverment run program... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just another great goverment run program... (Score:4, Insightful)
Under their control, 87,000 flights a day cross the skies of the US. Despite incredible crowding at and in the airspace surrounding a large number of airports, collisions are one-in-billions events. The vast majority depart and arrive without undue delay. (And anyone expecting no delay in such a dynamic system with so many variable is smoking some good stuff.)
In this incident, a problem was detected, backup procedures implemented, the problem was fixed, and full functionality was restored - all in a matter of hours without halting the system.
I'd be the first to admit that there are a lot of badly broken government programs - but in this case, you're just blowing smoke.
Parent
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That's true. The U.S. GOVERNMENT built the best air traffic control system in the world back in the 50's, one so robust, well designed and well managed that it has been the safety and operational count leader world-wide
Re:Just another great goverment run program... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, these are the guys (the feds) I want building cars, taking over health care...thanks god they are not building the planes. I'm just trying to think one government run organization that works as well as any private one. Any idea?
This morning I was woken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Dept of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Dept. of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.
At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on roads built by the local, state and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issued by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door, I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After work, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to a house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and the fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it's valuables thanks to the local police department.
I then log onto the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.
Parent
I'm this many. (Score:2)
It was the second time in 15 months that a glitch in the flight plan system caused delays.
Thanks for the arbitrary use of months. Is it a baby, or were you working from fortnights and thought you might as well round to the nearest lunar cycle and then convert to Gregorian? Do you also append "and a half" to your age, as appropriate?
Yeah, right. A cynic's view. (Score:3, Interesting)
the best layover (Score:2)
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By "glitch" they mean "totally offline delaying and canceling flights".
I'm pretty sure they had lots of other bugs and "regular glitches" in this time.
On the other hand, I'm also pretty sure that this kind of software does indeed go through a much better development and verification process than most commercial software around.
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No, by glitch they mean glitch. "totally offline delaying and canceling flights" is the result the glitch.
"On the other hand, I'm also pretty sure that this kind of software does indeed go through a much better development and verification process than most commercial software around."
the scheduling software? probably not. It was done out of house for contract by people who don't give a damn the moment the software releases.
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I'm not sure about where the FAA's flight plan software falls in, but I'm guessing that since it's not safety critical, and only an operational risk...
Considering that flight plans exist to prevent planes from crashing into one another, I'd lump them into your category of "safety critical."
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.
Parent
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And some of which still runs on cryo-cooled Univac machines...
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.
Parent
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1) Money
2) Management
If nobody see the need for spending a certain amount of money for a system, then you may get a system which fails on occasions.
If once every 15 months is acceptable, then no need for more money.
But if you want a more robust system, then more money may need to be spent.
Which would mean that companies would need to be giving the FAA more money. So suing the FAA would defeat the purpose of what they are trying to achie
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I was responding to a post that implied that this failure could cause a midair collision. It could not. I didn't address the possible economic impact of the failure because that wasn't the topic I was responding to.
But, since you brought it up, what would be the economic impact of fixing it so it could never, ever fail under any circumstances? Moreover, is that even possible?
Keep in mind that flight safety stuff is standalone. Each zone has their own RADAR, their own control systems, and is a self-conta
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.
Parent
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You and dtmos (see post further down in this thread) should get together for a beer. You're both stuck in Atlanta, and it's after noon. :)
Slashdotters meeting in person? Whoda thunk it. LOL.
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apparently people didn't understand the difference between the question mark at the end of my sentence and a statement, since people decided to mark it a troll. Do people not know what a question mark means? I was hoping someone would reply with actual informative info.
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.
Parent