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Air Traffic Control "Telephone Glitch" Delays Hundreds of UK Flights
First time accepted submitter biodata writes "The BBC is reporting that hundreds of UK commercial air flights have been delayed for most of Saturday due to an internal telephone systems problem in the National Air Traffic Control Service, and delays are likely to continue into the evening. A spokesperson said that it was a different software bug from the one which grounded flights in the summer."
"difficult software bug from the one which grounded flights"
well, spellchecker did not complain, so we're all set...
Rich
I believe you meant to say "different software bug," not "difficult software bug."
Samzenpus chose to combine different cult using an ultra-liberal poetic license. Bugs are not an option with this telephone system... they come bundled with it.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This wouldn't -- no counldn't have happenned in the days before computers.
Eventually, I think centralised computer control is going to go the way of semaphore. It's too easy for a centralised computer system to glitch, break, be shutdown, and then screw up the lives and functions of millions.
What we should see is decentralised systems run using independent computer systems.
May the Maths Be with you!
Yeah I can understand that - after seeing goatse you cannot concentrate on your programming and create all sort of nasty bugs ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
but a day/night switchover.
which means they have back-assward management in the first place, for not operating a life-safety system as a 24/7 operation.
carbon-based computation should not be part of the core logic on which the air control system rests.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Jackass
Could I maybe get a tl;dr on that?
`One of the key changes involves improving the warning messages that flash on the air traffic controllers' screens when an aircraft moves out of their area of control and responsibility. The aim is for a warning to flash on the display to remind the controllers to ensure that they have completed all their co-ordination checks before an aircraft leaves their screen and becomes the responsibility of others.
"There is a quirk over whether it flashes or not," says Chisholm. "We want it to work in 100% of cases".
It is important to fix this problem because the Swanwick system, unlike the current manual process, supports the automated transfer of aircraft from one air space sector to another.
Currently at the London Air Traffic Control Centre, when controllers relinquish responsibility for an aircraft, they confirm this by phoning the appropriate new controller. This will not happen under the new automated procedures at Swanwick'. link
It's just an unfortunate incident.
British Telecom has had an issue (which has happened a number of times) which led to a minor timing glitch in one of their systems. When this happens, the data reliability on the FARICE line to Iceland drops and you start getting corrupted flight messages. Shanwick was alerted to the problem and both sides consulted and decided that the best solution in the interrim would be something that had been done previously, disconnecting FARICE and thus forcing all connections through the backup line, DANICE, which appeared to be operating normally.
Unfortunately, the problem was even worse on DANICE. What appeared to be normal operation was only normal up to the data logger. Once it actually got to the flight tracking software, the messages were being refused, and corrupted messages being sent in the other direction. So while BT was working on getting their system fixed, flight control managers were being forced to basically manually dig up ATC messages and copy-paste them off to the air traffic controllers (as much was handled through voice as possible as well).
But it got even worse. A totally unrelated communications network, Datalink, decided to misbehave during all of this, which may or may not have been due to the Shanwick problems. On the Iceland side, the general solution is to force a switchover to the backup system. Which was done... except a critical component on the backup system immediately crashed. Repeated attempts to switch and ultimately switch back caused even more problems for the air traffic controllers.
Eventually the fixed FARICE line was brought back up, Datalink back online (with the switchover-crash problem postponed to be investigated during a low-traffic timeperiod)
It's terrible that there were so many delays, but these are extremely complicated systems with a challenging task, built up over decades with tons of computer components, protocols, lines, routers, radar systems, transmitters, and on and on, scattered all over the world. On a weekend. Everyone was scrambling and doing their damndest to fix it as soon as possible. It should also be noted that it was never a safety issue - even in the absolute worst case, air traffic control could go all the way back to the old paper-and-pencil method. What the systems give is, primarily, speed, and thus when there's big problems, there's delays.
And that was my weekend, how was yours? ;)
Clean coal harnesses the awesome power of the word 'clean'.
And yet you fell for it.
I was traveling from Heathrow to Beijing via Helsinki (5.5 hour lay-over) that was supposed to leave LHR at 7:30 but was delayed until 9:00...the estimated departure moved again backwards and forwards once (after we got on the plane), but it seemed to be a minor delay from my point of view.
The most annoying thing was that the online systems weren't showing the disruption. I was looking at the departure board at LHR and it was showing the delay (though it took a while), but the online web page and the 'Heathrow App' for my android phone both showed no delay even though it was ~8am already. I was due to meet someone for lunch (during my 5.5 hour lay-over) and I had smsed them about the delay, but they had called the airport authority and were told there was no delay, and so they experienced some inconvenience while they waited.
The good thing was that the flight from Helsinki to Beijing was very sparse, and I was able to use a whole 4-seat row to sleep on - I guess many flights missed the connection. Sucks to be them, but good for me, I suppose :)
Max.