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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.
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Apparently you did nod read the lead. He fired them.
wake up and hold your nose
So did they send in the new Scorpion team to save the day?
Alternate view;
You come in late, leave early and do as little as possible while you are here. When someone calls you on it you try to burn the place down. Keep up the good work.
Is there any wonder there are disgruntled employers?
Your solution is "don't travel so much?" With all due respect, go fuck yourself. We already pay fees on airline tickets to pay for things like this. If the system cannot handle the current load, then the system needs to be upgraded.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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?
They have a backup for the hardware but when the building had to be cleared the controllers had to leave their stations. Sorry but it is not feasible to have a complete crew sitting around in another complete office just in case something goes wrong.
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.
Police said the man is a contractor, not an air traffic controller or FAA manager.
Reading is hard.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Well, he does have SOME benefits. He'd get free room and board and meals for a number of years now.
If he was hired to mow the lawn he would have access to the site. It's pretty hard to stop someone from taking a can of gasoline and tossing it over a fence (or some such).
It also comes with a free gym membership where he can meet new and interesting people.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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?
Reroute the data to a cloud service have the PCs remote into virtual workstations and have the radio fed through the same system. Small amount of latency, but should not be an issue. Hell. Build out the whole system on the same frame work and distribute the hell out of the workloads.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
You want them to land planes from home? LOL That has to be the silliest thing I have heard all week.
. . . and unlimited dates!
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.
He was transferred to Hawaii. I can think of few reasons to not want to leave the midwest for Hawaii (or, basically, anywhere).
Easy BitCoins
Sure they did... they've got backup airspace all over the US.
Apparently he tried (unsuccessfully, so far) to commit suicide, so job prospects were probably not part of his agenda.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That's actually a really good point. If you want to get access to sensitive locations, get hired onto the work crew. Want a key to the CEO's office? Become a janitor.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Are you under the impression the controllers land airplanes?
Reroute the data to a cloud service have the PCs remote into virtual workstations and have the radio fed through the same system.
Imagine making the call to your HOA: "do you mind if I install a primary and secondary radar system on the rooftop of the apartment building? Yeah, I need that for work. Ok, thanks, bye"
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Are you under the impression that every home internet connection has an SLA? I really wouldn't want to be in the air with an emergency while my controller was staring at "Connection reset by peer".
He shouldn't have too much trouble finding work. Alton Nolen, the guy that beheaded a co-worker in Oklahoma this morning in another incident that is also Not Terrorism had only been released from prison a year ago:
And I am sure our wonderful District Attorney Prater is already on his way to file life in prison charges against the owner of the company who saved countless lives by shooting and killing this maniac. But that's modern liberal life in Oklahoma. Kill a gun wielding thief, go to jail for life. Kill a couple of unarmed innocents, go to jail for maybe 10 years, out in 5.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Which is exactly why lots of people wonder about the intelligence of hiring on the lowest bidder to clean out and stock commercial aircraft. You know, those people who scrunch down everywhere in the cabin with no supervision. Who load baggage in the hold after the TSA 'screens' it. Who deliver boxes and boxes of stuff to all manner of aircraft.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Indeed.
And even if the system is secured (hah), all it takes is some malware on a controllers home computer (or if there is a work issued one, for one of them to let their kid install limewire (or whatever the current virus bag is) on it.
Is it though feasible to set up the the system so those controllers can go home, login to a VPN and have a nation wide system that they can load their area into and continue work?
And then when some Chinese hacker breaks in and redirects every plane in the country to Newark, you'll be bitching about the stupidity of connecting the air traffic control system to the Internet.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
The real problem is that the airlines switched from having a few flights a day between point a and point b using medium sized or large aircraft to having more flights per day using smaller aircraft.
Reverse that and you wont have anywhere near as much of a problem (especially if the airlines have an incentive to use larger planes as demand grows rather than adding more flights)
You do realize that 50 to 60 percent of an airline ticket are taxes and airport fees?
Yeah....that's not true.
The people you're talking about go through a ton of screening before being allowed onto an aircraft. They couldn't just bring a bomb in from their car.
You fail-over to another controller, obviously.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
These are not the trollsocks you want...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
They have a backup for the hardware but when the building had to be cleared the controllers had to leave their stations. Sorry but it is not feasible to have a complete crew sitting around in another complete office just in case something goes wrong.
No, but it is feasible to have fire breaks that make it unnecessary to evacuate all of the controllers in the event of a fire. Check out the way they do it in the UK counterpart: http://www.bristolairfield.co.uk/london_control.php
Has 1000 smoke detectors and 500 manual fire alarm call points
Is divided into compartments separated by walls giving two hours fire resistance.
Of course that UK centre's building is probably several decades newer than the building(s) were in the US.
depends on how transparent the breakdown is... I do recall some airfares that were pretty close to 50/50 fare/taxes+fees, and I certainly have long distance phone bills that clearly show pennies worth of calls and dollars worth of "fees" that are carefully described as "not taxes".
So, while everything isn't "taxes", they are larger than you think, but the "profit" part is generally pretty small. For example, the current "profit margin" for American Airlines is negative That can't be good...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
travel forced on employees
I'm a frequent business traveller. I appreciate getting out of the office and getting in front of customers and other users.
Whoosh!
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
No, everybody should carry matches! They would surely have stopped this maniac that way! It's the damn gubiment saying we can't carry matches...
The system handles the current load just fine. They just haven't gone to the expense of making it doubly redundant so when a major facility goes down it causes problems. Once ADSB becomes mandatory in 2020 this will be less of an issue for a radar facility like this since each airplane will be broadcasting it's position and vector to every other ADSB equipped airplane and they won't need ground based radar to maintain separation.
I don't know about commericial airlines, but I know that when I was checking private jets, the airline fees and taxes was much more than 50% of the cost. It was closer to 80-90%.
But which do you think is more common?
Mind you, doing it in a way so easily traceable is a sign of being so upset that you count as crazy, but there's often a reason (or more than one) that people go crazy.
FWIW, "going crazy" in ways analogous to this is a part of our evolutionary toolkit for dealing with abusive management. It doesn't work as well in modern society, as those in control have learned to isolate themselves from the possibility of retribution, but in earlier times reactions analogous to this would lead to the abused person being killed, and the abuser being injured, often permanently. Which would make it much easier for his successor to take him down. The math justifying this is too complex for me to follow, but those who have worked it out say "it's probably right". It does assume that most of our evolution happened in small groups of reasonably closely related individuals, but that seems a quite reasonable assumption.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Overall I don't know and neither do you because there are no real numbers. There are plenty of example of workers slacking off. Just go to any road construction site.
"...The people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. [pause] Do not fuck with us."
--Tyler Durden
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Is there any wonder there are disgruntled employers?
Disgruntled employers?? Shit like this pisses off everyone. It causes panic among the people that get to enact new laws that fuck over the rest of us, for our protection!
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Reroute the data to a cloud service
Oh what fun the hackers would have!
...planes ...the sky ...funny.
Oh I get it, cloud service
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
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.
The people you're talking about go through a ton of screening before being allowed onto an aircraft.
As someone who works at an airport, no, they don't.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
No, but they do sometimes make confirmations visually. Now by web-cam? Sorry but I don't want the ATC turned into the University of Phoenix.
That would be tower controllers. This fire was in a windowless building.
Thanks for the Troll mod, Prater.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You do realize that most of the taxes and fees on your airline ticket go to things like building, maintaining, and staffing airports, traffic control centers, etc? So these are legitimate expenses of running an airline that would be built into the cost of a ticket one way or another.
The complaint is probably more about fossil fuel consumption and associated pollution. That's a lot of crap being spewed into the air.
He's still a jackass, though.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Yep, I'm sure Prater comes on, gives himself a few modpoints, and personally mods you down.
More likely you got downmodded for half-offtopic political ranting.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
If by "a ton of screening" you mean a fingerprint check and signing a statement saying you haven't been convicted of felonies like murder, arson, & hijacking in the last ten years, then yeah, a ton of screening.
You'd think they could just distribute the load a little bit, instead of cramming everyone and every function into one place.
Building A goes down, you can operate at reduced capacity by carrying on with Building B.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The way air traffic control works is responsibility for each aircraft is handed off from center to center as the move between area. The issue is the controllers have to work together to ensure safety and separation. If you "distribute the load" to different buildings you decrease communication and therefore decrease safety. When you are dealing with aircraft going hundreds of miles an hour you can not wait a couple of minutes for a question to be answered.
There's probably a good reason for that. AA simply refuses to take my money, and on the occasions that they do, they don't fly.
In the last 18 months, I've booked 3 flights with AA to/from various parts of the world, however I have flown with them precisely zero times in that same time period. I have, however, booked and flown on numerous other routes with numerous other airlines without any issues, so I've pretty much given up on even trying AA.
From what I hear, I'm not missing out though... so fuck 'em.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
I just bought return tickets to England. $293 flight, $768 taxes and fees. So yeah...
Some of them are. Most? I'd like to see a breakdown of that. I recall reading that TSA fees alone recently went up double digits of $ and since I consider the TSA not to be legitimate in the first place, that's a good place to start.
That's actually a really good point. If you want to get access to sensitive locations, get hired onto the work crew. Want a key to the CEO's office? Become a janitor.
:)
Cleaners and janitors are a known known issue with physical security. So this is unlikely to work with the likes of the NSA
You can (and should in this case) run your own private cloud for something like this.
I know it is all the rage to be an ass. You fail at it though and still look like an ass.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
All cloud services are run by outside companies. That's what makes them cloud services. The cloud is everything you don't have direct control over.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Yes I want the people tasked with keeping planes from hitting each other sitting in their recliner fighting sleep cause they are overworked. I want them to be susceptible to loosing Internet in their apartment because the cable man is an idiot and cant hook up the new neighbor properly. I want them to be susceptible to usage caps and the prime time netflix slow down that happens every night. I want them to be distracted by kids making noise in the parking lot and the lawn care guys mowing outside their window.
I just think working from hoe for them is a super keen idea!!
Protip: Think things through some huh?
Sick brag.
Wasn't meant as a "brag", but it's the only numbers I had access to. For example, a 4-seater jet from my local airport to one that I fly to most:
Source Airport Fee $4,336.35 ($956 Fuel, $31.44 Landing, $157.60 "other", $22.31 parking, $3,169 reposition)
Dest Airport Fee $4,662.04 ($269 Fuel, $6.26 GPU, $12.29 landing, $37.53 "other", $8.34 parking, $4328 reposition)
Flight Rate $9,029.13
Fed Excise Tax $1,461.69
54% in airport fees and taxes.