FAA says communication breakdown delaying flights

[Refugee 7]

ATLANTA — The Federal Aviation Administration says a communication failure at a Georgia facility that processes flight plans for the eastern half of the U.S. is causing flight delays around the country.

FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen says there are no safety issues and officials are still able to speak to pilots on planes on the ground and in the air.

She says she doesn't know how many flights are being affected.

Bergen says the problem that occurred Tuesday afternoon involves an FAA facility in Hampton, Ga., south of Atlanta, that processes flight plans.

She says there has been a failure in a communication link that transmits the data to a similar facility in Salt Lake City.

As a result, the Salt Lake City facility has to process those flight plans, causing delays.

[Echosoftom 3]

I don't know about anyone else, but this sounds a bit scary to me. I've always got this fear in the back of my head that these hackers will break into the air traffic control system one day. Imagine the possibilities of that.

[Pettyjunkie 0]

^I much rather not. That is a very scary thought.

[Refugee 7]

Watch the movie, Sneakers, with Robert Redford, Sydney Poitier, Dan Ackroyd, River Phoenix and David Strathairn.

Hackers, scary thought.

[Echosoftom 3]

^ Ooo, I love that movie.

[angelic_22 0]

Frankly (and security not withstanding), Ill bet reliability would be better if they used commercial telecommunications instead of whatever private network they must be using.

The big commercial telecommunications providers really know what they are doing and have very high 'availability' levels - They talk about how many 'Nines' they have - as in "the system will work 99.9999 % of the time". Building in lots of Nines costs a fortune because everything has to be redundant (in addition to being built right in the first place).

Think about it - how often did your land-line telephone fail during the last year? If ours failed it might have been for less than a minute.

(365*24*60 -1) working minutes in a year / (365*24*60) total possible working minutes in a year *100% = 99.9998 % The phone was 'available' for use 99.9998% of the time. Not bad at all.

How many Nines you willing to pay for? Guess it depends on what happens when it fails huh? Is it a flight control system, or just a video game? Maybe some grim accountant even computes the risk / reward ratio in terms of the value of lost lives, etc vs the savings for reducing the robustness of the design, and the big boys decide from there... 'Acceptable losses' and all that.

Wonder if we'll ever learn exactly what combination of rare events randomly conspired to knock the FAA off the air. And as strange as it may seem, shit does happen sometimes. Recently plenty of people (myself included) were amazed at the random occurrences of two trans-oceanic fiber optic cables being damaged at about the same time. Might this portend some kind of cloak and dagger conspiracy? Sure seemed fishy. But the probabilities are that given enough time, even something as off the wall as that would, eventually, happen. No black helicopters required.

Stay safe, don't leave the house and wear a helmet

Edited August 28, 2008 by Relic

[Pankie 0]

Aaaaah, technology -- isn;t it great? ---pppfffttt...