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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.”
Lockmart is complicated. My division of Unisys was bought by the Carlyle group, which also bought IBM's Federal Systems division, combined the two, and sold the result to Loral. They stirred in some other fragments of defense contractors and sold the result to Lockheed. I'd left Unisys before they sold us, so was surprised to get a call from Lockheed asking why I wasn't drawing my pension. Those two shards of Unisys and IBM had some very good people in them, something I knew both from working in the Unisys group and overseeing the IBM group when I was at MITRE. I was in the Ada community starting with Strawman in the mid-70s. A fair amount of our language design was intended to overcome the failures of management by both DoD PHBs and contractor PHBs. Ultimately, military use of Ada faltered because of the desire of the defense industry to de-skill the programming task. They wanted to pay C++ coder salaries, not software engineer salaries. Ada survives in places that want to do highly-reliable, life-critical systems, increasingly in Europe rather than here.