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Whiteboards used after Gatwick flight information screens fail

bbc.com

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Re: Whiteboards used after Gatwick flight information screens fail

#12
post #9
post #2

My first thought was that the whiteboards themselves failed, that this was some kind of The Onion article, but it isn't. It's simply that the backup plan to the failing digital boards, are plain whiteboards.

Same. That is a really poorly worded headline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Re: Whiteboards used after Gatwick flight information screens fail

#14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These screens build information from multiple sources inc. airlines, ground control, and in some cases airport management. They're typically run off-site at a data center since that provides high resiliency and some data is sourced from outside the airport anyway. If the airport has a dedicated fiber channel between their data center and airport itself and it was damaged, this could be the result. The question I'd as…

It seems so strange that they wouldn’t have a redundant link (like the various options you suggested) or at least fall back to easily available public data (flight information sites) that would at least help some.

Some years ago, we lost access to our data center although it had triple network redundancy. What happened was that three cables were leaving the DC leased by three different companies. But a mile down the road, all three different cable entered the same physical pipe. When the physical pipe was severed, all three network cables went dark. We should wait until they announced details of what happened before we decide that we know what happened and offer solution ("If they only had redundant links")

Re: Whiteboards used after Gatwick flight information screens fail

#20
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These screens build information from multiple sources inc. airlines, ground control, and in some cases airport management. They're typically run off-site at a data center since that provides high resiliency and some data is sourced from outside the airport anyway. If the airport has a dedicated fiber channel between their data center and airport itself and it was damaged, this could be the result. The question I'd as…

It seems so strange that they wouldn’t have a redundant link (like the various options you suggested) or at least fall back to easily available public data (flight information sites) that would at least help some.

Or even the option of inputting the data manually on a local system, so they could use the big displays rather than some whiteboards!
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