Flight Control Center Problems May Be Y2K Related - PASS

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http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/00/141761.html

I haven't seen this posted yet. Forgive me if it's a duplicate.

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A software "patch" that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) installed on its host computers before the Y2K rollover may have been responsible for the computer system crash that grounded planes all over the East Coast today, according to a specialist that supervises work on the FAA's computer systems.

Last week, workers from the Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS) - the union representing workers who fix and maintain the FAA's computer systems - told reporters the FAA had ordered an eleventh-hour computer patch to be applied to all of its host computer systems around the country, in an apparent last-minute effort to stave off complications from a possible Y2K glitch.

The system failure at the Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center in Leesburg, Va. earlier this morning comes on the heels of a similar breakdown at an air traffic control center in Boston earlier this week, where a crashed computer hard drive held planes in limbo for hours and delayed flights at nearby airports.

PASS national assistant Mike Perrone said that although the two problems involved a malfunction in different types of equipment, the FAA may not have thoroughly tested the patch in its rush to fix its systems before the New Year.

"I'm not saying these two situations are identical, but when all of a sudden you've got two problems pop up just a few days after you've put a patch in...it's kind of hard to say that's just a coincidence," Perrone said.

Perrone said a new host computer at the Leesburg air traffic center became overloaded with flight information when Wednesday's data was not automatically cleared from its memory. The resulting shutdown forced the FAA to ground planes at all three Washington, D.C. area airports, causing backups at airports in Boston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Raleigh, North Carolina, and all three New York airports.

FAA spokesman William Shumann, said Peronne's statement "borders on the irresponsible," and added that the true cause of today's glitch was not yet entirely clear. Shumann said the only thing that was clear was that the problem was not related to the software patch.

"The patch contains about 16 lines of code, inserted into a system with hundreds of thousands of lines of code," Shumann said, adding that the patch was put in place Dec. 30 to deal with the "very rare chance that something could happen exactly at the rollover to the New Year. There is no evidence that the patch has anything at all to do with this morning's outage," or the outage in Boston, Shumann said.

Shuman did say there seemed to be at least a "superficial resemblance" between the incidents at Boston and Washington in that "both apparently involved a problem in a peripheral unit that led to a problem in the main computer itself."

The equipment that broke down at the Washington center today was installed by the FAA in March of last year.

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.

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-- themom (themom@canoemail.com), January 06, 2000

Answers

Hi

It is clearly the FAA who is being irresponsible here. The comments by several spokespeople that it is not "y2k related" is ludicrous. Just as the Hershey's SAP upgrade is related to y2k, so is this. Several upgrades and patches have been made to FAA systems in the last year. Frankly, I don't think they ever did end-to-end field testing to figure out all of the interactions. The controllers themselves suggested it was not tested properly. This was a hurry up job because of the deadline. The dismissal of the problem because of "16 lines of code" misunderstands the intricacies of software.

Additionally, the comments from FAA spokespeople (and others) that "it couldn't be y2k, because it didn't happen over the rollover" shows that they themselves may not fully understand their own system. The systems break when traffic is at peak levels because that is when the systems are strained, or in this case, when multiple systems interact with each other.

At a minimum, we can say that the new upgrades and patches are no better than the old systems, which frequently broke.

A Boston Herald report also stated that the breakdowns happened near 7AM and 7PM (the latter midnight GMT)

For further info, see http://www.bostonherald.com/bostonherald/lonw/faa01052000.htm

-- Bud Hamilton (budham@hotmail.com), January 06, 2000.


Sure, you could kill it in one line: "while(1);"

But why the obsession over whether it is or it ain't? Didn't you see the blanket denial strategy as inevitable. All that matters is the number and severity of faults, and knock on effects. This was one one minor incident with few knock ons.

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), January 07, 2000.


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