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Nearly 2,000 Chicago Flights Canceled After Worker Sets Fire At Radar Center
SpzToid sends this news out of Illinois:
Nearly 2,000 flights in Chicago have been canceled so far today as federal aviation officials slowly resume operations at O'Hare and Midway airports following a fire that was deliberately set at an FAA radar center, apparently by a disgruntled worker. The center handles high-altitude traffic across parts of the Midwest. Controllers there direct planes through the airspace and either hand off the air traffic to other facilities handling high-altitude traffic or direct the planes to terminal radar facilities, including one in Elgin, which in turn direct planes to and from airport towers.
but this is way too literal.
You mad bro?
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
This is a high-visibility example, but employers should really learn it can be much cheaper to gently gruntle your workers than to deal with the consequences.
2000 flights cancelled because of this one incident clearly shows that there are way too many travellers pouring into the skies above us. Corporations should be taxed for unneccessary travel forced on employees. The rest of you should stay home more often and watch a movie with your mate.
So first he gets fired and then in his brilliance he decides to do something stupid and will hopefully go to jail. Nice job prospects for him after that.
Police said the man is a contractor, not an air traffic controller or FAA manager. ";We understand that this is a local issue with a contract employee and nothing else,"; Aurora Police Chief Gregory Thomas told reporters. ";There is no terrorist act."
Thank Allah!
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
So, in the space of an hour this person goes from being trusted enough to control the safety of 1000s of air passengers to not being trustworthy with a box of matches. Do we not monitor people in these positions better ?
Nullius in verba
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Work your ass off, indentured slave, no one gives a shit about you, you're fucking replaceable, and if you ever even dare to think for yourself, you're going straight to prison where you belong, you worthless little terrorist.
Is it any wonder why there are disgruntled workers?
2,000 cancellations is only 50 more than usual for O'Hare. What a fucking shithole of an airport.
Could it be related to those Islamic groups? Just like Alton Nolen situation?
The FAA had no backup. SHOCKER
So did they send in the new Scorpion team to save the day?
So there's no provision for having the work done at this center be taken up at other centers? The news reports say radar center, but can't the data be routed elsewhere? What it there were a much larger fire that took down the facility for months? Does that mean Chicago becomes a no-fly zone?
No
I would think that the major hubs in the US didn't operate with this poor of a practice. Honestly, I'm flabbergasted. This is not something you can hide when it's exposed. What I find more surprising is that with this big of a deficiency, they didn't go with the "terrorist" card in order to deflect some of the backlash this should cause.
I wonder how many other airports are using a system with similar vulnerability.
I don't see this as just a problem with some guy who obviously did something wrong. Seems like lighting or other natural events could have the same impact.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
In one workplace in Ohio a coworker chopped off someone's head after being fired.
Fire is the least of your worries
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
its obvious that we need to regulate matches. When one person can just walk into a store buy a pack of matches and threaten 1000 innocent airplanes we have an epidemic in the USA, Other countries have sensical match control laws. It is about time the USA got on board too.
If we could have outlawed matches this tragedy could have been avoided. Yes the problem with the USA is there aren't enough common sense laws.
Redundancy is really expensive, bro. How will management pay for their golf outings if you spend the budget on actual work?
... I could set the building on fire... could I have back my stapler?
Remember when Ronald Reagan fired all of the air traffic controllers because they had the nerve to form a union and strike for better pay? Now the air traffic controllers work on obsolete equipment, get paid very little, have a stressful job with long hours, oh and are the only people stopping planes from running into eachother. I am almost amazed no one has gone crazy before now.
cheap contract workers are better than investing in employees!
If a single person can cause so much havoc without killing anyone — and without the condemnation and sympathy for the victim concomitant with any would-be murder — the terrorists don't need to kill.
Heck, they don't even need to set fire — just phone-in an anonymous warning.
A moderately motivated group could also disable a city's subway system for hours — by boarding the trains on carefully picked stations and pretending to have a seizure of some sort. Our kind society's rules (as evidenced in that paragon of humanity New York City) say, you can not be taken out of the train — except by "qualified personnel". So all other passengers will be removed from the car and the train will wait for the EMS to arrive and figure out, what to do with you. If your friends do the same to every other subway lines at the same time — during rush hour — your organization is bound to get donations, all without you killing or maiming a single person...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't know much of anything about how air traffic control works, but a fire at a single radar station practically shutting down o'hare seems to point towards a single point of failure, that probably ought to be looked at.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Aren't these kinds of critical systems supposed to have backups? I see DHS/TSA is too busy strip searching children/grandmas, securing chicken farms & writing up justifications for their abuse of authority to bother with the "unimportant" things like securing/fortifying the transportation infrastructure.
The truth is that when all your neighbors are safe and happy you can be safe and happy. Here we have an angry man who apparently feels that he has been wronged. Or we could say disgruntled as it is the word of the decade apparently. I'll bet the guy was never gruntled in the first place. Funny how we never hear the word gruntled. But one way or another the man obviously feels like he was getting screwed and he took action. I'm not approving what he did but it is human nature. We do need to make certain that all people are doing OK and that the system does not stack up laws, rules, trends and barriers that cause some people to suffer.
It is obvious that his future is now bleak but it may have been bleak whether he did this crime or not. The fastest way to stop all crime is to make certain that others are doing well without regard for their position, abilities or efforts. Picture this : an ugly ghetto exists. People in the ghetto drink too much out of frustration and boredom. But our system allows liquor stores to operate in ghetto areas and poor schools to exist as well. And then we act all shocked when the ghetto youth is acting out, all cranked up, with a gun in his hand.
Is society any better or smarter than the ghetto kid blasting away with that gun?
criminal act = criminal act , it gets you state time.
criminal act + political objective = terrorism, it gets you federal time in Florence or martyrdom in Terre Haute
Looks like TFA was designed for 640x480. Also what happened to the borders for slash posts/comments? My brain craves structure. Floating in whitespace unsettles me.
This guy was a telecommunications specialist working in the basement. Are you familiar with the type?
He is a contractor whose direct employer is specified as Company A in the affadavit.
Apparently he looked in the mirror and did not like what he saw in himself or in his employer.
He was being transferred from Chicago to Hawaii. Disgruntlement?
He claims it's a crisis of conscience.
sitting off in a corner of OHare masturbating like there was no tomorrow.
I'm sure the Führer of HomeLand Security will goose-step march into Big-O's Orifice and demand TSA guards assigned 1-to-1 for every FAA employee, in order to kill the FAA employee when signs of Impurity and Treason occur.
Sig Heil
redundancy introduces interesting failure modes. When you don't care about edge cases, redundancy is great. When you have to account for edge cases, redundancy is expensive, complex, and reduces the viability of the project. And, I'm pretty sure, given that we have flight operations back up, that the FAA's much more robust (but not automagically fail-over) approach to redundancy worked adequately. While they generally fuck up everything else, they've gotten ATC done as well as is plausible.
Yes, the system has redundancy, but it's much more designed to fallback v.s. failover. If there weren't humans in the loop, maybe it would make sense for another facility to pick up the load, but when you've got humans doing the ATC job, well, it's probably a "very good thing" for them to be familiar with the traffic and area they're working, and have a few minutes to prepare and a few minutes of hand off, instead of just dumping hundreds of returns on their screen with the "go ahead, fix it" attitude. Since nobody died in this incident, the system appears to be adequately robust for this event.
Will the person who modded my comment down please read it?
He did not set the whole facility on fire. He tore up the floorboards and set fire to whatever was underneath his basement workplace.
He was cutting his own throat with a knife when emergency crew got there.
He wrote that for the first time in a long time he gave a shit.
This is not the profile of a disgruntled worker. It sounds more like a story about a repentant member of some secret police -- domestic surveillance squad.
The reassignment to Hawaii sounds like a promotion, as it was for Snowden.
We'll know more if the government actually brings this guy to trial. That's why I think they won't.
Several comments have questioned the single point of failure. I am sure that it will be a key question for the NTSB to examine when it looks into this incident. However, I would point out that the system is designed to fail to backups, but it appears that Mr. Howard who was "worked for an FAA contractor at the Aurora facility for about eight years, handling communications there" knew what to destroy so as to prevent such back-up systems from functioning. The report mentions "The (radio) frequency failed" which would lead me to speculate that he severed the connections to the physical transmitters before torching the communications system. The comment about "a floor panel had been pulled up, exposing telecommunications cables and other wires" seems to say that Mr. Howard who should have know the system he maintained well, was able to damage a particularly sensitive set of equipment and or connections.
My biggest question is, what is so bad about a transfer to Hawaii? I'm sure there were personal reasons to stay, but I still cannot help thinking that if I gout the chance to leave Chicago for Hawaii I'd jump at it.
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
The paramedic then saw Howard’s feet sticking out from under a table, and saw Howard under the table, shirtless and in the act of cutting his own throat, according to the complaint.
Turns out it's very difficult to behead yourself.
"Today is the day I burn this mother fucker to the ground"
This incident happened in my back yard, and based on the comments there is a lot people don’t know about the topic.
First this happened at an Enroute center that regulates the macro-level traffic, typically high altitude, for the Chicago region. I think there are a total of 15 in the country. These centers work in concert with Tracon facilities that handle lower altitude traffic and marshal the planes in an out of the airports.
In regards to resiliency, the “system” was able to recover in reasonably short order. Right now the Aurora facility is off-line and is declared a crime scene. It’s under the control of another federal agency for a few days. During this time, the “system” is offloading the Chicago workload to adjacent facilities in the region (ex. Indy, Minneapolis, etc...). There are obviously some continuity plans in place. Not ideal, but reasonable.
If you wanted to step-up to the next level of resiliency for the air traffic system, you’d want to put duplicate capabilities in Enroute and Tracon centers. By design, each big airport usually has Enroute and Tracon centers about 40-50 miles apart from the main airport. From what I understand from friends in the industry each facility have similar systems, but different duties. If you wanted to have a hot-standby type solution, you’d want to build out duplicate capabilities at both sites, so an Enroute center could fail over to a Tracon, or the other way around. It seems logical to me, particularly as this resiliency pattern is common in the marketplace today. I’m sure many of the readers here could whiteboard out solid solution pretty quickly.