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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.
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.
Correction: "Not so fast..."
Modnays.
Table-ized A.I.
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!
Airports that are not busy have the luxury of pre-allocating gates days or even weeks in advance. When I've flown out of Heathrow, usually they will have allocated the gate by check-in time if the incoming flight was on time, but if they are still trying to figure out when the incoming flight is going to be needing the gate, they may not have allocated it yet. On short distance flights that have a quick turnaround, this is probably going to happen more frequently, mostly I've taken long haul from Heathrow, and prefer to use City airport for short flights, which does not have this issue.
No country trusts any other country with security since 9/11. Transit passengers always pass through security screening again, though only the US makes you collect checked baggage first.
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.
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.