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Software Glitches Cause Airport Delays in Britain
bnoise writes "There has been air traffic delays of up to 6 hours today above UK (and this includes north atlantic flights). A BBC News article points out the reasons: a software upgrade. Another article gives more general information about the delays. Companies pin-pointed are IBM (initial development) and Lockheed Martin. If only they were using Open Source Software in the aviation industry... By the way, is there any Open Source project in the aviation sector? A search on Freshmeat gives back 5 projects."
There are flight control/traffic control projects in open source..
Anybody who has caught transport to LA and flew out did so on open source traffic control all the way from the train transport to flying out..
the software runs on Linux currently....
There awas even an article in several linux magazines..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
It's situation normal for the UK. I can't remember a public-sector IT project that hasn't run hugely over budget, over schedule, and most of them are eventually abandoned. Tony Collins (writer for Compuer Weekly) has written books on the subject. And yet still we carry on repeating the same stupid PHB-driven mistakes as last year. Afterward there's an enquiry by the National Audit Office, various private sector companies are scapegoated, and yet are welcomed back with open arms when they tender for the next mega-project. NATS (national air-traffic control system) is already a disaster of this type - wildly over budget and > 5 years late (IIRC). Yes folks, FIVE YEARS LATE. Actually the chief villains are EDS, Anders - uh - Indenture, Cap Gemini et al. Having worked at Logica for a while (a similar "IT Services" house) I have to say I would never go back to such an organistation... nowhere is mediocrity, political manouvering, lack of technical knowledge, and being told what to do by one's suppliers so exalted as in public sector IT projects. Of course Blair are just starting to fawn over Microsoft (having been granted an audience by Bill Gates: the notion of there being some sort of backlash or alternative to Microsoft doesn't seem to have crossed their minds.
Sigh. And tax just went up 1%, allegedly to fund the health service, but if they just stopped pissing away hundreds of millions per project on stupid obvious mistakes they'd have MORE than enough to fund education, health, law & order etc.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Agreed. Software that runs air traffic control, and airplanes themselves, not to mention other saftey-critical roles, needs a lot of careful coding. A lot of money is spent on software like this.
And what use would open sourcing it be? Granted, there may be the opportunity to look through the code, but how many home hackers have a spare 747 sitting in the backyward to test their changes on? The whole idea of open source is to a allow contributed development. I fail to see how that would help in this situation.
Who is going to be motivated to work on software that they can probably never run themselves?
They're talking about a couple of things. Southern UK mainland general air traffic (excluding TMAs of airports etc.) was handled a centre at West Drayton. This was exceptionally long in the tooth, generating lots of fun stories about forty year-old computers etc.
They decided a while back to replace West Drayton, and built "the world's most advanced" air traffic control centre, at Swanwick. Many years after it was due, Swanwick opened for business recently.
Of course the didn't just switch over and shut down West Drayton. To the press, West Drayton was a "backup". In fact it was (is) handling a bunch of movements. And a couple of months back, they had a large system crash. This was, as usual, sold as "problems with old computers" playing up. From inside NATS (National Air Traffic Service) one hears a different story: something about sysadmin (if you will) error knocking the thing over.
But Swanick is late and expensive. At heart, it's an IT project, after all...
That's definitely photoshopped. The other responder states that you can see planes queuing at Heathrow (London's main airport) which is true, but these are queued behnd each other, usually at least 2-3 minutes apart.
I've worked at Heathrow (Concorde taking off about fifty yards away is impressive, but it's very weird as it's completely silent - the soundproofing in those buildings is astoundingly good) and although the skies are getting a little cramped, a picture like the one that adorns this story would give most air traffic controllers a heart attack.
I'm a little disappointed in the BBC. Photoshopping composites to illustrate a news story is quite common, but this particular picture could easily be perceived by naive readers as genuine - I think this is straying dangerously near to FUD.
Open Source ATC.
www.openatc.org