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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.
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.
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.
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.