UK air traffic control meltdown
jameshaydon.github.io
UK air traffic control meltdown
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Re: UK air traffic control meltdown
#2"the description sounds like the procedure is working directly on the textual representation of the flight plan, rather than a data structure parsed from the text file. This would be quite worrying, but it might also just be how it is explained."
Oh, this is typical in airline industry work. Ask programmers about a domain model or parsing, they give you blank stares. They love their validation code, and they love just giving up if something doesn't validate. It's all dumb data pipelines At no point is there code models the activities happening in the real world.
In no system is there a "flight plan" type that has any behavior associated with it or anything like a set of waypoint types. Any type found would be a struct of strings in C terms, passed around and parsed not once, but every time the struct member is accessed. As the article notes, "The programming style seems very imperative.".
Re: UK air traffic control meltdown
#3And why could the system not put the failed flight plan in a queue for human review and just keep on working for the rest of the flights? I think the lack of that “feature” is what I find so boggling.
Re: UK air traffic control meltdown
#4"the description sounds like the procedure is working directly on the textual representation of the flight plan, rather than a data structure parsed from the text file. This would be quite worrying, but it might also just be how it is explained." Oh, this is typical in airline industry work. Ask programmers about a domain model or parsing, they give you blank stares. They love their validation code, and they love jus…
That's super interesting (and a little terrifying). It's funny how different industries have developped different "cultures" for seemingly random reasons.
Re: UK air traffic control meltdown
#5And why could the system not put the failed flight plan in a queue for human review and just keep on working for the rest of the flights? I think the lack of that “feature” is what I find so boggling.
> why could the system not put the failed flight plan in a queue
Because it doesn't look at the data as a "flight plan" consisting of "way points" with "segments" along a "route" that has any internal self-consistency. It's a bag of strings and numbers that's parsed and the result passed along, if parsing is successful. If not, give up. In this case fail the entire systemand take it out of production.
Airline industry code is a pile of badly-written legacy wrappers on top of legacy wrappers. (Mostly not including actual flight software on the aircraft. Mostly). The FPRSA-R system mentioned here is not a flight plan system, it's an ETL system. It's not coded to model or work with flight plans, it's just parsing data from system A, re-encoding it for system B, and failing hard if it it can't.
Re: UK air traffic control meltdown
#6"the description sounds like the procedure is working directly on the textual representation of the flight plan, rather than a data structure parsed from the text file. This would be quite worrying, but it might also just be how it is explained." Oh, this is typical in airline industry work. Ask programmers about a domain model or parsing, they give you blank stares. They love their validation code, and they love jus…
That's super interesting (and a little terrifying). It's funny how different industries have developped different "cultures" for seemingly random reasons.
It was terrifying enough for me in the gig I worked on that dealt with reservations and check-in, where a catastrophic failure would be someone boarding a flight when they shouldn't have. To avoid that sort of failure, the system mostly just gave up and issued the passenger what's called an "Airport Service Document": effectively a record that shows the passenger as having a seat on the flight, but unable to check-in. This allows the passenger to go to the airport and talk to an agent at the check-in desk. At that point, yes, a person gets involved, and a good agent can usually work out the problem and get the passenger on their flight, but of course that takes time.
If you've ever been a the airline desk waiting to check-in and an agent spends 10 minutes working with a passenger (passengers), it's because they got an ASD and the agent has to screw around directly in the the user-hostile SABRE interface to fix the reservation.
Re: UK air traffic control meltdown
#7Interesting to see that flight plans over the UK have to be filed 4 hours in advance.
No mention of plane, pilot, passenger and cargo manifests. So why the 4 hour lead time, is this the time it takes UK Authorities to look people up or workout if the cargo could be dangerous in an airborne Anthrax (Gruinard) Island [1] or Japanese subway Sarin [2], or an IRA favourite, fertilizer bomb thats bypassed the usual purchase reporting regulations used by people like Jeremy Clarkson and Harry Metcalfe as their store of wealth[3]?
It makes me wonder just how much more surveillance of the population exists, knowing I cant even step out of the front door without attracting surveillance of the type that followed Dr David Kelly.
Sure its not a cyber attack per se, carried out over the internet like a DDOS attack or a brute force password guessing attack with port knocking mitigation, but how would one carry out a cyber attack on this system if the only attack vector is from people submitting flight plans?
There sure is a constant playing down of the cyber attack angle to this which makes me think someone wants to Blurred Lines!
One point on the lack of uniquely named global way points, which is the main crux of the problem falling over if some are to be believed.
The USA demonstrates a disproportionate number of similar names, by virtue of Europeans migrating to the US [4]. So has this situation arisen with this system in other parts of the world like in the US? How can a country that created the globe spanning British Empire become so insular with regards to air travel in this way?
I'd agree with the initial assessment that there appears to be a lack of testing, but are the specifications simply not fit for purpose? I'm sure various pilots could speak out here, because some of the regulations require planes to be minimally distanced from each other when transiting across the UK.
On the point of ICAO and other bodies to eradicate non-unique waypoint names, its clear there is some legacy constraint still impeding the safety of air travellers, perhaps caused by poor audio quality analogue radio, so perhaps its time for the unambiguous and globally recognised What 3 Words form of location identifier, to come into effect?
The UK police already prefer it to speed up response times [4]. And although the same location can create 3 different words, suggesting drift with GPS [5], even if What 3 Words could not be used for a global system, having something a bit longer to create an easily recognisable human globally unique identifier is needed for these flight plans and perhaps maritime situations.
Obviously global coordination will be like herding cats, and if such a fixed size global network of cells were introduced, some area's like transiting over the Atlantic or Pacific could command bigger cells, but transiting over built up areas like London would require smaller sized identifiable cells. But IF ever there was a time for the New World Order to step up to the plate and assert itself, to create a Globally Unique Place ID (GUPID) for the whole planet, now is the time.
On the point of humans were kept safe, only by the sheer common sense of the pilots and traffic control tower staff, its not something NATS did or should claim, their systems were down, so everyone had to resort back to pen and paper and blocks in queues, and apart from Silverstone when the F1 British Grand Prix is on, is air space ever that densely populated.
NATS were caught with their pants down at so many levels of altitude, is this laissez faire UK management style that saw the Govt having to step in to bail out the banks during the financial crisis, still infecting other parts of UK life and still coming to light?
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Zr0IPtx80
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTr1lquCQMg
[3] https://youtu.be/LS54AJSadT4?t=279
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._places_named_afte...
[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-21/u-k-polic...
[6] https://support.what3words.com/en/articles/2212837-why-do-i-...
Re: UK air traffic control meltdown
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's super interesting (and a little terrifying). It's funny how different industries have developped different "cultures" for seemingly random reasons.
It was terrifying enough for me in the gig I worked on that dealt with reservations and check-in, where a catastrophic failure would be someone boarding a flight when they shouldn't have. To avoid that sort of failure, the system mostly just gave up and issued the passenger what's called an "Airport Service Document": effectively a record that shows the passenger as having a seat on the flight, but unable to check-in…
SABRE is pretty good compared to the card file it replaced.
Re: UK air traffic control meltdown
#9Of course they blamed the French ^^
Re: UK air traffic control meltdown
#10This is not the first time this has happened; the phenomenon has even got a name - "poison flight plan".