NADIN -- Aftermath

All is quiet again the in FAA’s world. It sits awaiting its next embarrassment. As an ex-air traffic controller, I find the reaction to last week’s incident quite interesting. There are far more dangerous incidents that happen on a far-more-regular basis. They just don’t cause as many delays. Funny -- what gets people’s attention.

The Associated Press has the best summation I’ve found. It really doesn’t tell you much about what happened (you aren’t going to learn about that anyway) so much as it shows the predictability of the positions various entities take.

The Press still compares apples to engine blocks;

”Redundancy is so critical for power and water utilities that they can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars a day...“

The ATA stays “on message” no matter what the issue or whether it is related to the event;

”Basil Barimo, vice president of operations and safety for the Air Transport Association of America, a trade association that represents the nation's largest carriers, says the fundamental problem is that the FAA still relies on outdated technology, including a radar-based control system designed in the 1940s and '50s. “

The FAA, when confronted with the problems of today, talks about the brighter future in the hazy distance;

”"We should see significant improvements by the end of September ... which should prevent the type of problem we had on Tuesday," said FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown. The agency also is considering adding a third backup site for that and other systems at a technology center in New Jersey, but no final decisions have been made, she added.“

And my friend, Doug Church of NATCA, keeps telling the truth -- as every news organization puts the FAA-inspired asterisk by his statements -- hoping that the general public will recognize it when they see it;

”However, Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association — a union that has been locked in a contract dispute with the FAA since 2006 — argues that the agency has tried to focus on future technology to deflect its lack of diligence in maintaining its current systems. “

Interestingly, the rest of the article goes on to agree with Doug Church’s statement. It even finds several experts (even if they’re engine-block experts) that agree with his statement. Yet, still, we must discount Doug’s statements because he represents “ a union that has been locked in a contract dispute with the FAA since 2006“. (BTW, it’s Labor Day weekend 2008 -- two years since the FAA made this “contract dispute” permanent.)

If you speak “geek” you might be interested in this article.

Corrupt File Brought Down FAA's Antiquated IT System

”"What happened yesterday at 1:25 p.m. [EDT] was that during a normal daily software load something was corrupted in a file, and that brought [the] system down in Atlanta," FAA spokesperson Paul Takemoto told me. “

I don’t speak the language. I just wonder why anyone is messing around with the computer at 1:25 in the afternoon.

In case you missed it, there’s a second page in that article.

"If you look at the root causes of most network outages, north of 70 percent of them are caused by configuration errors by humans," Van Zant told me. "Computers fail a whole lot less often than the humans punching things into computers fail. Network engineers, as smart as they are, are not immune from that."

I got to speak to a controller friend about it all. He didn’t know what really happened either. He was too busy working with a brand-new trainee when it happened. Thunderstorms everywhere, one of the Towers had to abandon ship because of a tornado warning and too many flight plans to correct -- put in incorrectly by that contracted-out Flight Service system we warned you about. Just another day in the life of an air traffic controller.

Despite all that he seemed pretty happy. I guess that’s because he was inviting me to his retirement party.

An inexperienced and demoralized workforce, a “fix-on-fail” maintenance policy, vital functions contracted out, a problem-plagued data communications system without the needed redundancy -- NADIN doesn’t really rank up there as a major problem. Things could be worse. A lot worse. And they will be. Very soon.

Don Brown
August 31, 2008