Flight control centre problems may be Y2K related

Friday, January 7, 2000

ENTERPRISE

Flight control centre problems may be Y2K related

NEWSBYTES

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 United States East Coast yesterday.

Last week, workers from the Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS) - the union representing workers who fix and maintain the FAA's computer systems - said 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 Centre yesterday comes after a similar breakdown at an air traffic control centre 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 might 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," Mr Perrone said.

Mr Perrone said a new host computer at the Leesburg air traffic centre 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 Mr Peronne's statement "borders on the irresponsible", adding that the cause of the glitch was not yet clear.

Mr 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," Mr Shumann said.

The patch was put in place on December 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, Mr Shumann said.

Mr 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 centre was installed by the FAA in March.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), January 07, 2000

-- Sheri Nakken (wncy2k@nccn.net), January 07, 2000

Answers

See response to earlier post on this subject.

This Newsbytes article may have been the source for the Boston Herald link I posted.

-- Bud Hamilton (budham@hotmail.com), January 07, 2000.