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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.”
So how does a 40 year old computer system get replaced and only doubles the number of flights capable of being tracked?
Hmmm. People are still the same size, fuel is still the same, turbines still use the same theories, the planet hasn't gotten bigger, the atmosphere is still the same, our materials are still the same..
Could it be, and this might be a shocker, could it be that the limits on materials have nothing to do with information processing?
For example, you might want to sit down for this and read it a few times, could it be that just because processors got a thousand times faster it doesn't mean that we can somehow actually put a thousand times more airplanes in the air?
I'm just wondering out loud here.
Two million lines of code actually isn't that impressive, either for economy of code, or for scale of code, the two goals that you may publish such a statistic to support.
Windows 8? 40 million lines.
Quake 3 engine? 30 million lines.
The government has just come out and told us that the scale of complexity in a system that "doubled" capacity and that they paid who knows how much for... has about the complexity of the average enterprise class iPhone application.
And were those projects for safety-critical systems? Were they replacing 20 years of development where the new system was required to perform every task almost exactly as the original using an entirely different architecture or did you get to make your own requirements from scratch and adapt them however you pleased? Was that system so heavily integrated that a basic task was way too complicated for unit tests which means that all testing had to be performed manually in an integrated environment or using a vast array of virtual machines to push the test data? Did that project require extremely tight security with many different clients in the private and public sectors (requiring drastically different security checks) as the system processed data from those sources and sent custom-filtered data back? I could go on and on, but again, it probably wouldn't matter because it's not something you can appreciate until you've actually done it.
Were you willing to guarantee your projects were defect free? The FAA is an excessively risk adverse organization. In some ways this is good, it's safer to fly from LA to London than it is to drive 10 miles from your house to the airport, even though you're in a metal tube traveling at nearly the speed of sound (so fast that human reaction times are effectively a moot point, once you see an obstacle in your way you are already dead) through all sorts of crazy weather and other challenges. The downside of this is that it is almost impossible to get them to replace a working system, even if the replacement is objectively better than the old one. One problem the FAA runs into on a regular basis is that tertiary technologies (like their network and comms systems) are constantly going obsolete and most of the vendors disappear and the only ones that remain jack their prices up into the stratosphere because they know they have a captive market.
I read the internet for the articles.
Written in Ada can make things better, but written by Lockheed Martin, so it balances itself out.
You are largley right here, the gains in thoughput in the system will be made by reducing seperation between aircraft, so you can have twice as many aircraft on the same airways. Those reductions in seperation can only go so far, as you have to have a system that can still fail back to stone age (100% down) and still be reasonably safe. At that point controllers fall back to using primary radar, radio and bits of paper in stacks, i.e. how it used to be done before computers.
The improved processing and tracking allows some saftey margins to be compressed, but not many, and not by much.