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Software Upgrade Crashes UK Air Traffic Control System
pitpe writes "Earlier today the computer system controlling most of the UK's airspace failed, after tests in preparation for an upgrade failed. The original failure occurred at the West Drayton centre, which is an old (70's) system, as opposed to the new system at Swanage, which has had its own problems. A system wide reboot to fix the system resulted in the entire system being taken down temporarily."
Maybe they can just use Prince Charles' ears for Radar?
And I was going to put the blame on M$, but if it's a 70's system we're talking about I'll just shut up.
Ah the good old reboot and hope for the best method :D
Well no, none of your dollars are going to the UK, unless the US is routing their tax to the UK somehow.
strange person.
"which is an old (70's) system". As long as it's not 30-year-old hardware then the software should still be fine. Why does everyone think that simply because software was written in the past it is bad?
Considering that up until about 2000, all of the major Air Traffic Control centers in the US were running on vacuum tubes, we were lucky nothing like this ever happened here. Sure, there were glitches at regional centers, that required controllers to do everything by hand, but nothing that required a full reboot of the entire country's ATC system.
Hopefully the UK will get the new system tested and online before it causes more problems!
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
It seems they have been having problems with their computer systems since 2001 when it was "privatized".
"The air traffic service has been beset by problems since it was partially privatized in 2001. A $484 million center at Swanwick in southern England opened five years late in 2002.
The opening was delayed by problems with computer software, and the glitches continued for months afterward, as controllers misread aircraft altitudes and destinations because of hard-to-decipher computer screens. In at least one case, controllers mistook the Scottish city of Glasgow for Cardiff in Wales.
Now.. that seems like a pretty big mistake for me.. especially for an air traffic controller to do. However, the article later states that:
"Transport Secretary Alistair Darling said Thursday's problem did not lie at Swanwick but at the older West Drayton center, which is due to be closed by 2007."
Thank goodness that old one is closing, however it doesn't sound like its replacement is doing any better!
"If you want to know what is wrong with transport in this country it is that over decades successive governments did not spend enough on the infrastructure and air traffic control is no different," Darling told BBC radio."
Excellent quote! While terrorism is on everyone's mind, we sometimes forget that safety of transportation should also be just as high. I couldn't imagine pilots relying on themselves to fly airplanes amid the thousands of others without the aid of traffic controllers and their computers.
Hmmm.
Perhaps a person experienced in ATC software or hardware could enlighten us on the specific system in use, its OS and other trivial bits.
It would help to reduce the coming surge of Microsoft jokes, which is very likely not relevant here.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
National Air Traffic Services http://www.nats.co.uk/services/index.html are the outfit responsible for this.
3 .html which explains quite nicely what they did and why.
They have a press release http://www.nats.co.uk/news/news_stories/2004_06_0
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Yeah, it would have never installed in the first place.
BSOD: Blue Sky of Death
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There are redundant systems in place. Analog radar, humans with brains.
At least there should be. Computers crash, break, have bugs, etc. They're a tool - a more efficient and convenient tool to be sure.
But when they break, there are contingencies so that planes can still take off and land, and wont just fall out of the sky.
This is also why Y2K was such a bunch of stupidity. We really aren't as reliant on computers as people think. We know they crash and are prepared to handle it when they do.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Much the same thing happened last
week in Dublin
It appears you are trying to land a plane. Would you like to:
[x] Allow Windows to detect new hardware ?
[ ] Allow planes to circle in uncertainty ?
[x] Show this window at all airports
This wouldn't have happened had they been using Linux.
This might have happened even if they were running linux. If the software that is used for the air traffic controlling was written badly it still could have crashed.
Evolution or ID?
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/news/050404_local_airp ort.html
It's not too surprising, after all when the system was developed it was re-tendered 2 or 3 times because of gross failures, I think it was something like 8yrs over due and 20M over budget.
Hurray another British triumph!
Told you so! At the year 19804 it just HAD to go wrong....
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
It's worse - the terrorists are using mobile phones to plan their acts of evil.
Don't say that too loud -- they're going to ban cell phones once they learn this.
(I just hope the US government never realizes terrorists breathe the same air as we do. "Patriotic Air and Breathing Security Millenium Act")
We get it all the time in our company, software that previously worked and isn't touched just stops working. Maybe we've got some sort of infection.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
We all know this happens when someone talks on their cellphone during take-off.....thats what the warning is for, right?
Check out gflightcontrol-0.01, then run the usual:
Of course, it requires gnome 2.6 and all deps. Planes will have to circle while everything emerges.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
This wouldn't have happened had they been using Linux.
No, the air traffic controllers would still be figuring out how to cut/copy/paste while a 747 is on it's final approach.
as for the system crashing in the first place, it's unfortunate, but a good thing that they were able to cope and keep everyone safe - that's the main thing, right? (it's certainly my main concern)
and as for the software not being up to the job, it may well not be. after all, air traffic has increased ever so slightly since the 1970's - is it reasonable to expect a program presumably designed for 70's hardware, and 70's air traffic loads to cope with heathrow in 2004?
The new centre is at Swanwick in Hampshire, not Swanage in Dorset!!
--
This sig is inoffensive.
http://www.nats.co.uk/services/index.html
and
http://www.nats.co.uk/news/news_stories/2004_06_03 .html
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
How much effort does it take to make the link a hyperlink rather than just text that by the waqy has a space in the middle of it that means it wn't work if pasted in a browser?
dipshit
Swanage is a pleasant little seaside resort. I know it well and stayed there a few nights when on my honeymoon.
Finding Swanwick and Swanage on a map of southern England is left as a exercise. Hint: Mapquest may be a good place to start.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
Yes, I think that the software structure of a critical realtime system like ATC is much more important than which OS or language it's written in. It should be built like a strange composite stranded cable, with different strands of simple structure that can survive sporadic (even systemic) failure of its parts. In such a system, there should be no such thing as a system-wide reboot, since the only thing that is truly system-wide is the data.
Without this structure, Linux would probably fail at an unacceptable rate too.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Links are those things which start "". You appear to have posted URLs instead.
In the tradition of software upgrades this one also became a downgrade. Microsoft was belived to have pioneared this technique but it seems the 1970's air traffic system predated microsoft.
How much effort would it be to program the perl script to auto anchor links? Dipshit.
And here we have brought up on liberal dose of reboots , preferably once every few minutes, simply to ensure everything works
err, if you keep your fingers crossed, that is!
http://efil.blogspot.com/
...the air stewardesses always tell you turn off your computers, mobile phones and Gameboys while the plane is in the air.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
s/blue screen of death/bodies blown to bits
Mod me down if you like, but, I've always wondered about the use of mobiles on aircraft...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but, were the passengers on the 9/11 aircraft not using their cellphones to call loved ones just before the tragedy happened?
Surely, if it's as bad as they're making out, using their mobiles would have caused something to go wrong with the flight controls/computer systems onboard...
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
Slackware has had ATC for years.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Who the fuck knows? I doubt the AC you're replying to hacks Slash, so he's hardly responsible for your lazy ass not being able to post a proper link, is he?
To quote from the NATS (National Air Traffic Services) press release:
"The FDP was being tested overnight for a future upgrade. The system was successfully returned to service but at 06.03 errors were detected in the distribution of flight data between Centres. As a precaution, we decided to restart the FDP (known as a cold restart) causing an interruption to full service. The data processing system was restored at 06.42 and declared fully operational at 07.03. Flight capacity restrictions were lifted at 08.05. The system is now fully operational and we are confident that it is stable.
Through the response team at West Drayton, we have been working with airports and airlines to clear the delayed departures, and expect the backlog to be cleared quickly.
Our investigation into the cause of the problem is continuing."
Let me get this straight: they ran a test on the FDP. The FDP glitched. They rebooted the FDP. They are still investigating the problem.
Now, unless I am mistaken, I can only infer from their statement above that they are now running the FDP which is still susceptible to the problems highlighted by the test.
rpm -Uvh gflightcontrol-0.01
much more efficient
Just what are you trying to say here? Do English chimney sweeps not actually have a Cockney accent anymore?
I do know things have changed a lot since the 1960s, so although I would be disappointed to learn this, it is not too much of a surprise.
.. was actualy upgraded recently but they are still using the same old software.
article
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Hmm, I don't see any "This wouldn't have happened"s in the posts you Re'd too, but I'll jump in anyway. When I go to the UK (which very sadly is a hypothetical posit though I hope to change that one day) my dollars go with me. Do the airlines there not contribute to ATC? Here in the US all seats have an airport landing fee integrated into ticket costs and airlines also pay into the system. So it seems like a reasonable assumption that the ATC system in the UK is supported by travellers dollars. (They should, as they benefit from the service.)
Never just test software upgrades on Live systems
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
i was stating that the US TAXES wouldnt have gone there at all.. of course flying fees go towards ATC, but that's your own choice for going on holiday to the UK....... as for taxes? none go to the UK's ATC....
Considering that up until about 2000, all of the major Air Traffic Control centers in the US were running on vacuum tubes
:-)
I got news for you. All the air traffic control centers in the US are *still* running on vacuum tubes. What do you think the CRT displays in all the radars and computers are?
In fact the computer I'm sitting at right now depends upon a vacuum tube as one of it's most important parts, without which it would be rather worthless
So if excel had a flight simulator as an Easter egg, would that mean the ATC software would have excel as one?
...
Run away
=)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Jovial
:-)
It was/is definitly a defense industry language. The dollar is not a statement delimiter, its information for the billing system
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
How this managed to get 'Informative'... Click the link, you silly moderators.
airport traffic control system laying around to test it on?
What Operating System does it primarily use?
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Unconfirmed reports are stating that aparently one of the air traffic controllers accidently clicked on the "Windows update" icon. :P
We had our boyos try out a piece of kit for Irish ATC, costing over €100 million. It didn't work. I believe they didn't test it in an operational environment though. It still made news, people are a bit suspicious of government expenditure on technology after the electronic voting débacle (Lots of equipment bought - supposed to be used June 11th. A committee pointed out they couldn't even test it to approve it as the company were still bringing out software updates! It's now sitting in a warehouse somewhere! Bunch of muppets).
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Did this AC say he was an Amerikan? Maybe, just maybe, this AC is one of the billions of people who live on our planet who are NOT Amerikan. Ever think of that? Of course not, silly me. Just to help you to open your xenophobic, close minded idiocy, here is a possibility for you.
Maybe this poster is, gasp, from the UK! Maybe he/she is employed, and "gasp", pays taxes. Maybe the concern is that these taxes are going to pay for this system, in the UK.
Did that blow your mind, or what! See, there are people on the planet who aren't Amerikan. Many of us pay taxes on our income, just like you do. Many of us live in these things called countries, that are not the US. Some of us are also concerned where our tax dollars are spent, just like you. The only real difference, is that we know about the US (a continual source of comic relief, really. It is funny if you don't have to live it!!). See, the world is a beautiful place, providing you can find a spot on it that isn't currently under attack from the US, either economically, or militarily.
Ever wonder why the rest of the world LOVES to vacation in Cuba? It is cheap, the weather is great, and there are NO AMERICANS. Its almost paradise from a tourist point of view.
My dad is helping the FAA and the US military design and roll out the next gen ATC software here in the US. He comes home and tells stories that make my skin crawl.
The first version of the software was built using standard current interface guidelines and widgets and the testing group that had no experience with older ATC systems were wowed at how simple and yet powerful it was. Pretty much any random person off the street could look at the screen and easily figure out what was going on and how to do various basic tasks. When that version was demoed to the ATC union the union freaked out at how different it was and thus began a cycle of making it more and more backwards.
So, nowadays the next gen ATC software almost exactly replicates the UI of the old non-computerized and semi-computerized systems. On-screen toggle switches and dials, that sort of thing. The FAA and the ATC union have decided that retraining all of their ATCs to use modern computer interfaces would be a Bad Thing. When the computer screen doesn't exactly replicate the interface of the 50+-year-old systems, they freak out and scream bloody murder. On the flip side, kids coming into the field today that have been using computers most of their lives are finding the interface to be counterintuitive to the point of being almost unusable. Middle-aged workers who are both highly proficient ATCs and home computer users report that switching between the two types of interfaces each night when they go home requires conscious effort on their part, since they are so orthogonal.
So who wins? Historical inertia, of course. Why fix the problem today when you can wait for your successors to fix it in 25 years?
Unless the system admins go on strike of course...
Moron, the UK does not use dollars. It uses pounds sterling.
The NATS London Area Control Center is of course, at Swanwick - not "Swanage" as stated in the original post.
You're gay.
Love,
A Concerned Human Being
"... in what I hope is a system not connected to the Internet in any way."
In actual fact it is connected to the internet ( albeit through SSL encryption ). This is as a result of a drive to cut sick days amongst ATC staff by allowing them to work from home, or from coffee shops or pubs, using specially adapted web browsers and their mobile phones or WAP access points.
Swanage is in Wales.
See my journal, I write things there
Maybe they'd been better off just using Windows? ..they can play Patience while planes are crashing around the air control tower..
- Voice of Ambience -
That was my first though.
My second thought was:
"Every job I've ever had in manufacturing in the USA
had the SAME attitude. Run it until you can't run it anymore, then we'll fix it."
Assinine policy. I've wasted SO MANY HOURS and hours and hours trying to get equipment in horrible repair to function to a mediocre level on a daily basis.
At one job I would have been able to easily output 3 times as much finished product (PER DAY!!!) if the machine
had only had $900 in repairs done to it.
The only "Preventative Maintenence" that was performed on the machines I've run has been by myself.
Sad sad mental attitude that I see way too often in the states. *sigh*
Although i'd really like to think that air traffic control was one of those areas where people were ultra careful and competant and the way the software was even developed just made it pretty impossable for anything to be screwed up. But im sure its something along the lines of:
"So they click here and it makes a little pretty toggle-switch icon flip over and that calls the function get_plane_stuff"
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Bit rot isn't spontaneous. It happens when other systems change, and hidden interdependencies fail. It is also falsely invoked when the SW was changed, but no one admits or remembers changing it. That can happen when (usually other) software changes the "rotten" software, or data on which it depends, unpredictably - usually through bugs. But software itself is static. That's why principles of deduction are so extremely useful in debugging. But not as quick as rebooting.
--
make install -not war
Personally, I'd like to privatise most of government but privatise it so that end users have choices. When things are privatised but supply government, it just seems to raise prices.
How does an Air Traffic Control centre cost that much? What is it? 400million quid? That's a lot of software engineers for that money. I don't think HM Government have a clue how much stuff really costs (but then most of them are ex-councillors, lawyers, union reps - not many ex-businessmen).
A: Lucas also makes refrigerators.
I never knew they partnered w/IBM in the UK
Remember, Every Lucas Switch Has 3 Positions
1. Off
2. Dim
3. Flicker
All Hail Lucas Prince of Darkness!!
(sorry, too much time spent w/a friends Triumph 750)
wow, and i thought i was the only one M$ trial period problems
In actual fact it is connected to the internet ( albeit through SSL encryption ). This is as a result of a drive to cut sick days amongst ATC staff by allowing them to work from home, or from coffee shops or pubs, using specially adapted web browsers and their mobile phones or WAP access points.
;)
Hope they aren't directing air traffic on a coffe shop in Amsterdam. Imagine what that will be
Right, that's the last time you catch me on a plane.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it