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US Switches Air Traffic Control To New Computer System
coondoggie writes: The Federal Aviation Administration this week said it had completed the momentous replacement of the 40-year-old main computer systems that control air traffic in the US. Known as En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM), the system is expected to increase air traffic flow, improve automated navigation and strengthen aircraft conflict detection services, with the end result being increased safety and less flight congestion. The FAA said the Lockheed Martin-developed ERAM systems “uses nearly two million lines of computer code to process critical data for controllers, including aircraft identity, altitude, speed, and flight path. The system almost doubles the number of flights that can be tracked and displayed to controllers.”
The system has been rolled out one center at a time over the past several years. This article is just stating that the last center has been converted and the transition from HOST to ERAM is complete. That's not to say that there weren't glitches along the way.
It was a shortage of computer memory in the $2.4 billion air traffic control system while a U-2 spy plane flew over southwestern US that caused LAX computers to crash and hundreds of flights to be delayed on April 30. “In theory, the same vulnerability could have been used by an attacker in a deliberate shut-down,” security experts told Reuters. Now that the “very basic limitation of the system” is known, experts expressed concerns about aviation cyberattacks.
$2 billion air traffic control system failure blamed on shortage of computer memory
Lockheed Martin, which created the En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) air traffic control system, claims it conducts "robust testing" on all its systems, yet the lack of altitude information in the U-2’s flight plan caused the automated system to cycle off and on trying to fix the error.
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
It's mostly Ada running on AIX. See http://www.iaeng.org/publication/IMECS2009/IMECS2009_pp1095-1099.pdf.
"Display System (DS), User Requested Evaluation Tool (URET) and ERAM and have been developed mainly in the Ada programming language. " Page 2.
"Product supportability advantages led to the selection of the IBM P series processors, the AIX operating system, and CISCO switches." Page 3.
You are insanely naive. You have no idea just how hard it is to build a safety-critical system on this scale. These systems have to be up nearly 24/7/365 and balance a ridiculous amount of data from redundant data sources while avoiding deadlocks and other sources of data contention. In addition to that, they undergo way more testing than you can imagine to ensure that the system handles those large volumes of data correctly and doesn't crash along the way. I used to think like you until I actually worked on an air traffic management system, so I can tell you that you can't possibly imagine how difficult it is until you actually do it.
This is what one the old systems looked like