Dublin Air Traffic Control Brought Down By Faulty NIC

Not so very long ago after passengers were left hanging by a similar glitch at LAX, Gilby4mPuck writes with another story of NIC failure leading to a disruption of air traffic, this time in Ireland, excerpting: "Data showing the location, height and speed of approaching planes disappeared from screens for 10 minutes each time. ... Thales ATM stated that in 10 similar air traffic control Centres worldwide with over 500,000 flight hours (50 years), this is the first time an incident of this type has been reported. ... '[They] confirmed the root cause of the hardware system malfunction as an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy,' said an IAA spokeswoman."

Comments

Re:ten minutes

[wintermute000]

there are plenty of examples of 10 minute failover

Older cisco ATAs take 10 minutes to swing onto SRST if keepalives are lost to the callmanager cluster.

a complex routing protocol refresh (big BGP networks) can take many minutes

a faulty NIC can easily bring down a LAN segment, with or without redundant switching paths - and it makes it look like a router failure as the router overloads trying to deal with the broadcast storm

Confusing terminology

[ddrichardson]

I work in aviation and wonder if the terminology being used by the newspaper articles is correct.

It appears to be talking about mode S IFF (Interrogation Friend or Foe) or SIFF radar systems which identify aircraft and appends height data. The speed is the only thing that needs calculating, as it isn't encoded in the pulse train.

Why this is weird is because much older bus technologies are normally used to handle this data being transferred than current network technology, such as MIL-STD-1553.

This makes me wonder if it was one of two things - a system inputing to an ethernet PC system that calculates and displays the information or more likely they are talking about a DLTU type stub connector (or remote terminal) used in such typical buses. This is unlikely because the bus systems they are employed on, the bus controller would have picked up on the failure during continuous built in test and pulled in an alternative.

If its the former then someone needs shooting. ATC is a realtime application and the overhead involved here would be unacceptable. I'm not even sure of the benefit of a network, multiple self contained indiviual terminals would be safer.