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Staff At Gatwick Airport Use Whiteboards After Flight Information Screens Fail (bbc.com)
Staff at the Gatwick Airport in southeast England had to write flight information on whiteboards for most of the day due to a technical problem with its digital screens. The BBC reports: Vodafone provides the service, and said a damaged fibre cable had caused the information boards to stop working. In a statement at 17:00 BST, a Gatwick spokesman said the issue had been resolved and flight information was being displayed as normal. "Tens of thousands" of people departed on time and no flights were cancelled. Apologizing to customers, he added that the airport's "manual contingency plan," which included having extra staff on hand to help direct passengers, had worked well. The airport earlier said a "handful of people" had missed their flights due to the problems.
Such ingenuity. I are amazed.
Many wow!
its usual to imagine, (generally, as well as in fiction, movies, tv shows etc), civilization collapse and end of the world as we know it, in dark violent apocalyptic(as in actual book of revelation) terms.
in fact, real apocalypse may be rather boring slow decline, which has perhaps already started in west.
in fact, there are historians, who think a new dark age has already begun in west, with low literacy, almost complete absence of knowledge of fruits and values of their own culture, its history, and subsistence level superficial lives totally dependent on government or big corps, of big majority of western population.
oh the humanity
Is this that fake news that people talk about?
In other news the battery to my cellphone died the other day and to contact a friend I had to drive around to his house and knock on the door! Amazingly this worked!
Had to keep track of them somehow.
You know, you can look that stuff up online now, using your phone. It's what I would do in such a case. If I'm traveling on my regular airline, I've already got the details in their app. I know what gate I'll be arriving at and departing from.
Because who needs redundancy in an Airport information system... the data isn't important enough to justify the cost! /s
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Every organization should keep a book of paper forms and tracking sheets to mass photocopy in case of a big systems crash. When you update a given book, rotate the older version to a different site so you have a spare if the first location gets whacked by disaster.
Table-ized A.I.
I've flown through many airports in the world, and the one I hate the most is any of the London airports. Why? Because they have this weird system where they won't tell you the gate you're supposed to be at until maybe 30 minutes before the flight boards.
Everywhere else I've flown the schedule is all pre-determined hours before the flight boards. Normally you get on a plane in one airport, transfer to the next, and your boarding pass says the gate and time for your connecting flight. I like to get to the gate, get some food, and relax until the next flight. Not in London! No, you have to sit around and wait in a little waiting area until they get good and ready to tell you which gate. So the screens not working at Gatwick is even more of a problem than it normally would be.
Not to mention that the UK doesn't trust ANYONE with security. So even though you already went through the crazy US Security and want to catch another flight out of the UK. The brits just don't trust it, so they make you go through AGAIN. This causes chaos, and one of the few flights I've missed was because of this policy. It just stinks!
I hate the UK airports so much I'll actually actively pay money to avoid them.
Correction: "Not so fast..."
Modnays.
Table-ized A.I.
Blame teachers instead of parents. Clearly, teachers get more time with the kids than parents, and bear full responsibility for teaching children.
No. The literacy problem is directly due to parents who don't give a fuck about their children.
I remember working 911...I started doing it in the very early 80's. By the late 90's/early 2000's everything was down on a CAD screen (computer aided dispatch). I mean everything! Maps, phone logs/calls, dispatch, directory, records checks...everything. Once, the CAD system went down, myself and a few "old timers" pulled out the orange cards I made up years ago. The only reason they were orange was when I made up the card, to mimic our 1st gen computer dispatch screen entry layout, all I had to print up a few samples, was orange paper, so the print shop figured we wanted them all on orange paper LOL. So we pull these cards out and tell everyone to use the cards. It was like speaking in a foreign language...dead silence, mouth open from the "kids". During the outage, one says I don't know where this address/location is. I said get out the map...THAT in itself was a Kodak moment....a map? but...but...but...I don't know how to read a map. If you don't have someone that knows the OLD way of doing something, when technology fails, and it does happen, everything grinds to a hault!
At least they had a fallback system / contingency plan, that seemed to have worked. That makes Gatwick do better than approximately (my approximation) 80% of airports in cases like that.
My family and I were in the Gatwick North Terminal from about 8 am till 10 am (when we walked to our gate). It really wasnâ(TM)t that bad. Of course idiot people would hang around the whiteboard in the hope it would get updated every 30s, like an appy app app would, and so be blocking others from seeing their flight details. We just strolled back every 10 minutes to check as nothing happens that fast it matters for boarding. An obvious improvement would be to have it on a small stage so it was elevated a bit.
And finallly they page missing passengers, I hear that being done every time we are there. So how the hell can people be dumb enough to miss their flight when the departure time is on the ticket, they have departure screens, you have an hour to get to the gate, and they shout your name out.....
The whiteboard eraser is the little-known backup media, and can store what was written, in a highly compressed format. It is the best kept secret of all.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.