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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.
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.
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.
You young kids and your social media! I my day, when I wanted to stalk a cute girl, I had to go to her house and hide in the bushes!!!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
No so fast: the airport owes me royalties; I have a patent on it:
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!
When I was a child, my family took a bunch of flights on vacation in the 1970s. Your ticket was a pre-printed boarding pass which looks kinda like the ones you get today, except they were on shiny magazine paper with three carbon copies. The travel agent you got the tickets from pulled the first carbon copy. I assume that copy was used to notify the airline that you'd booked for that flight. At the airport, the check-in agent gave you stickers for your checked baggage just like today, and pulled the second carbon copy to prevent you from checking in more than your allowed number of bags. I assume the second copy was also used to confirm how many people had showed up for the flight.
When you arrived at the gate, everyone would line up. The first gate agent would confirm your ticket was for that flight, cross-reference your name with a list of people who had bought tickets for that flight, and pull the last carbon copy (at which point the ticket couldn't be used again except for boarding). You then went to a second gate agent who would assign you a seat. If your name wasn't on the list, you got sent to the standby line, and would get a seat only if there were seats left after everyone who was on the list got a seat.
The seat numbers were printed on stickers made out according to the aircraft's layout. The second gate agent would ask how many people were in your party, find a row of seats where you'd fit, pull off the appropriate sticker(s), and stick them on your ticket(s). If you think about it, it's a great way to guarantee no duplicate seats are assigned, and no seats are missed without having to keep track of everything on paper (or computer). When the flight began boarding, you'd present your ticket with the seat sticker before being allowed to board.
If you missed a flight, the coupon book would still have the extra carbon copies, so the agent would know it hadn't been used and the payment for the fare was still valid (all fares were refundable back then, though usually you'd just use the funds to book on a different flight). Although theft of ticket books from travel agencies used to be a thing back then, since the thief could print whatever flights they wanted on them and turn them into cash by asking for a refund..
So no, you don't actually need computers to run an airline or board passengers.
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.