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:testing and QA

[zach_d]

in a high noise/vibration/dust environment?

Re:testing and QA

[jimicus]

Yes but if _one_ NIC can bring the entire system down what other single failures in a component could bring the entire system down? Obviously the system with the malfunctioning NIC can do any number of things that may result in a similar failure mode. Or what happens if the network switch it is attached to fails (I assume they use multiple paths... but if one nic can nuke it all, imagine if a switch went bonkers).

You don't need to bring the entire system down to cause havoc. What if there's a hitherto unknown bug in one of the CPUs which under some very specific set of circumstances causes aircraft altitude to be misreported on the operator's screen? As the GP said, most redundant systems only ensure that the components appear to be broadly working. They seldom check that all the components are doing something sensible.

Re:testing and QA

[Hal_Porter]

One of the odd and very likable things about Dune is that there are occasionally implications that the society we read about is not the most advanced. Maybe their taboos are limiting them. Essentially the world we read about is actually in its own version of the Dark Ages where progress has all but stopped and feudalism is the only system. The Tleiaxu and the Ixians aren't in a Dark Age though. But we don't here too much about them because they are outside the known world because they violate the taboos that govern the know world.

Essentially it's a bit like reading history Taliban controlled Afghanistan, or unfortunately anywhere with an Islamic government. And I'm sure it's deliberate - Frank Herbert apparently was inspired by the Islamic uprisings against the British.

Or if you look at another way he wanted to write a hallucinogenic, retro sci fi epic, and he came up with a bunch of explanations - the Butlerian Jihad, the necessary for spice based prescience for interstallar travel, and the incompatibily between directed energy weapons and shields to explain why his universe was that way and not like conventional sci fi with ray guns, robots and open societies in the Popper sense.