From the Dow Jones Newswires.

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November 16, 1999 --- Dow Jones Newswires

WSJE: Y2K Might Shutter Italian Airports

By CHRIS STAITI

Special to The Wall Street Journal Europe

ROME -- The half-million visitors expected in Rome to kick off the Vatican's Holy Year could be flying out again on a wing and a prayer, according to technical and aviation officials.

Main airports in Rome and Milan have fallen significantly behind in upgrading computers for the year-2000 date change and the systems haven't been fully installed or tested, according to documents filed with the International Civil Aviation Organization and made available through the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The DOT report notes that completion dates for the upgrades "are not available" and doesn't offer estimated dates of completion.

Taskforce 2000, a U.K.-based Y2K watchdog group, says Italy's airports are at serious risk of disruption for the entire month of January, along with airports in Germany, Switzerland, and Spain. DOT documents suggest, however, that Italy has the farthest to go in readying its computers for the year 2000, when machines unable to distinguish between 1900 and 2000 could cause problems.

At Rome's Fiumicino airport, systems for public safety and emergency services, weather information, fuel services, and ground transportation had not been renovated, implemented or tested by Oct. 15, according to the DOT documents. Navigation aids remain to be tested or put in place.

Milan's Malpensa airport, open just over a year, also is in need of substantial work to get it ready for the change in century. Systems at the airport's air-traffic control center, which also houses flight and radar data processing, had to be completely renovated, as they were not Y2K-compliant when installed, according to a report by the Italian airport authority ENAV.

Although Malpensa's report to ICAO has indicated that preparations were due to be completed by Sept. 30, the DOT notes that it has "no confirmation that actions have been completed." The airport authority and airport's management group didn't respond to requests for comment.

Technical and aviation experts are expressing concern that neither airport will be fully operational in time for the new year.

"You get to the point where no matter how many people or how much money you throw at a project, you just can't work any faster. A couple of weeks doesn't make much of a difference," says Nick Gogerty, a senior analyst at International Monitoring, a London consultancy that monitors worldwide Y2K preparations.

The firm has been predicting transportation delays of up to 25 days in Italy after Jan. 1, and is considering raising that after reviewing the airport data.

The lack of a complete end-to-end test at either airport is especially troublesome. Such testing can add up to half of the development time on large projects, as it uncovers bugs that hadn't cropped up before, Mr. Gogerty says.

"These types of large, complicated systems have to be up and running for some time, with all of their components, in order to detect all of the problems," he said. "You can't just plug them in and expect them to work right away." Many subsystems, he points out, aren't used every day, and problems with them might not show up for a month or more.

Luca Danese, undersecretary of Italy's Ministry of Transportation, insists that the airports will be ready on time and will be open at midnight on New Year's Eve. "We conducted simulation tests at both airports last week, and they passed beautifully," Mr. Danese said.

But analysts note that a simulation testing isn't always sufficient to find problems. They point to chaos caused last month after a systems upgrade at Rome's Termini train station left many people stranded and snarled trains between Rome and southern Italy for a week. Much of the testing of the system, which made the computers Y2K compliant and allows the station to handle more trains, was done by simulation, a spokesperson for the station said.

Technical experts say these kinds of problems are normal in implementing a system of this size. Sometimes they can be minimized by running the old and new systems together. If the new system fails at rush hour, the operators can switch over to the old one. However, this won't be possible at the airports, since the old systems won't be functioning due to the Y2K bug.

The risk of an accident at the airports is remote. Air traffic on New Year's Eve is typically low, a phenomenon airlines attribute to people being on the ground to celebrate, and everybody else to a fear of flying. However, traffic is unusually high just before and after New Year's Day throughout Europe.

But the failures, if they occur, could shut the airports. European skies are so congested that flying without air traffic control is not allowed.

"There's absolutely no free flying anywhere in Europe," says Shane Enright of the International Transport Workers' Federation. "A loss of air-traffic control closes the airport."

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-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), November 16, 1999

Answers

Who in their right mind would travel anywhere near rollover? What a mess. Happy Jubilee.

-- don't notice the facts (or you@might.think), November 16, 1999.

You can save money by only buying a one-way ticket to Rome.

-- Dog Gone (layinglow@rollover.now), November 16, 1999.