Dublin Air Traffic Control Brought Down By Faulty NIC 203
Not so very long ago after passengers were left hanging by a similar glitch at LAX, Gilby4mPuck writes with another story of NIC failure leading to a disruption of air traffic, this time in Ireland, excerpting: "Data showing the location, height and speed of approaching planes disappeared from screens for 10 minutes each time. ...
Thales ATM stated that in 10 similar air traffic control Centres worldwide with over 500,000 flight hours (50 years), this is the first time an incident of this type has been reported. ...
'[They] confirmed the root cause of the hardware system malfunction as an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy,' said an IAA spokeswoman."
Re:testing and QA (Score:2, Interesting)
More scary stories. (Score:2, Interesting)
Intermittent problems are the worst (Score:2, Interesting)
Well its a step above the old AppleTalk (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was administering a small network in Marin, every time we had a small earthquake, all of the AppleTalk connectors would come loose. Took hours to find the faults and push them together. I guess we should have used duct tape.
I suppose at an airport as each jet came in creating vibrations, those same connectors would have dislodged.
Re:testing and QA (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:testing and QA (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:testing and QA (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My idea of fault tolerance (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, this NIC's fault showed up as the radar not working. What were they supposed to fail-over to? Binoculars?
I suppose so, if it's possible to do it that way. Also, have the planes do the old-fashioned "circle the airport and keep an eye out for other traffic" if that works with big, heavy planes. It sure gives you (the pilot) a nice sense of being a free and sovereign person anyway, like on small airfields. :-)
Re:testing and QA (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes but if _one_ NIC can bring the entire system down what other single failures in a component could bring the entire system down? Obviously the system with the malfunctioning NIC can do any number of things that may result in a similar failure mode. Or what happens if the network switch it is attached to fails (I assume they use multiple paths... but if one nic can nuke it all, imagine if a switch went bonkers).
You don't need to bring the entire system down to cause havoc. What if there's a hitherto unknown bug in one of the CPUs which under some very specific set of circumstances causes aircraft altitude to be misreported on the operator's screen? As the GP said, most redundant systems only ensure that the components appear to be broadly working. They seldom check that all the components are doing something sensible.
Re:Confusing terminology (Score:3, Interesting)
While you're right, the key phrase from the article you give is:
Specifically, this standard is aimed at use on aircraft not in ATC, in fact because of the weight reduction it offers.
Also not to split hairs but Dublin is not in the UK, this seems trite but is valid as there are different agencies involved. More over, the appropriation of new technologies is obsessive in the UK at present and has been for some time (except in the financial sector). There is a perception that newer is better and that answers to questions nobody asked are best solved by combining off the shelf components in a similar topology to older generation systems.
There is an argument to upgrade ATC due to higher volumes of aircraft but I can't help wonder if there is a bigger drive towards efficiency rather than safety.
Re:testing and QA (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the odd and very likable things about Dune is that there are occasionally implications that the society we read about is not the most advanced. Maybe their taboos are limiting them. Essentially the world we read about is actually in its own version of the Dark Ages where progress has all but stopped and feudalism is the only system. The Tleiaxu and the Ixians aren't in a Dark Age though. But we don't here too much about them because they are outside the known world because they violate the taboos that govern the know world.
Essentially it's a bit like reading history Taliban controlled Afghanistan, or unfortunately anywhere with an Islamic government. And I'm sure it's deliberate - Frank Herbert apparently was inspired by the Islamic uprisings against the British.
Or if you look at another way he wanted to write a hallucinogenic, retro sci fi epic, and he came up with a bunch of explanations - the Butlerian Jihad, the necessary for spice based prescience for interstallar travel, and the incompatibily between directed energy weapons and shields to explain why his universe was that way and not like conventional sci fi with ray guns, robots and open societies in the Popper sense.
Re:testing and QA (Score:3, Interesting)
So putting in a faulty NIC card and seeing what happened wouldn't have done anything at all, huh?
Part of testing systems is trying to emulate what happens when a portion goes down.