UK Air Traffic Control glitches

"S Green" wrote in message
...

"Aviv Hod" wrote in message
...
From
http://www.forbes.com/business/newsw...tr1393847.html
or http://tinyurl.com/2v49t


"Air control outage adds to UK transport woes
Reuters, 06.03.04, 8:10 AM ET




It was the computer that produces the flight strips went down about 6.30am
local 5.30Z. Stopped all outbound flights for about 2 hours in the UK with
only inbounds being handled.

Problem sorted pretty quick. I had a colleague travelling from LHR to
Scotland at about 8 am and they were only 1 hour late on arrival.



Well I'm glad that this was sorted out as quickly as it was - the article
mentioned that they just rebooted the machine. However, the interesting
thing to me is that this super-duper $1billion computer system is merely a
support mechanism for what seems to me like an archaic paper strip system.
They're already dependent on the computer for generating the strips, so I
don't really see why it's necessary to use strips at all. There are plenty
of examples of complex systems that lives depend on that have accordingly
been designed with enough redundancy to be trusted by themselves, without
being held back to a merely supporting role of a manual process.

The paper strip system seems to me like an inefficient throwback to a time
when it was the only way to keep things straight. But we now have the
technological infrastructure to completely change the paradigm - using any
of the RNAV technologies, datalinks, radars, and pretty sophisticated
software for collision avoidance, command and control (much of which has
come from armed forces research).

So I buy (reluctantly) that any large IT project will be expensive. But are
we forever relegated to using paper strips that are shuttled using wooden
sticks from the tower to the approach controller who in turn depends on a
telephone line to negotiate transfers to other controllers? I just find it
hard to believe that we can't introduce more automation safely. What's it
going to take?

-Aviv Hod