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Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

flightglobal.com

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Re: Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

#161

Post by astrange »

Nevermark wrote: post #154
skykooler wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hacker News failure caused by two units 12 orders of magnitude apart sharing 2-letter code"

We better get this sorted out before open source manned Mars missions. That all programming languages, down to statically typed assembly, don’t support something as simple to validate as unit consistency says something strange about how the science of replacing unreliable manual processes with automated systems is really bad at the practice of replacing its own risky manual processes with automated systems. If numeri…

Some languages do; F# and Ada have units.

I agree no sexy languages have it, and almost all languages have terrible support or anti-support for correctness in numerical programming. It's very strange.

(By anti-support I mean things that waste your time and make it harder. For instance, a lot of languages think "static typing" means they need to prevent you from doing `int a,b; short c = a * b;` even if this is totally well-defined.)

Re: Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

#162

Post by joemi »

buildsjets wrote: post #96
ipunchghosts wrote: post #8

Title should be nmi

Maybe that is true in your industry. It is not true in my industry. NM is the legally accepted abbreviation for nautical miles when used in the context of aircraft operations.

Still, either "nmi" or "NM" would be better than the current and less correct "nm", even if "nm" is what's used in the article.

Re: Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

#163

Post by kccqzy »

ggm wrote: post #156

Could you front-end the software with a proxy which bounces code-collision requests and limit the damage to the specific route, and not the entire systems integrity? This is hack-on-hack stuff, but I am wondering if there is a low cost fix for a design behaviour which can't alter without every airline, every other airline system worldwide, accommodating the changes to remove 3-letter code collision. Gate the problem.…

The low cost fix is to fix the FPRSA-R software. The front-end proxy cannot easily detect code collisions because such code collisions are not readily apparent. The ICAO flight plan allows omitting waypoints and it is one of the omitted waypoint that collides with a non-omitted waypoint. If you have taken the trouble of introducing such a sophisticated code collision detection in the front-end proxy, you might as well apply the same fix to the real FPRSA-R software.

Re: Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

#164

Post by astrange »

zer8k wrote: post #123
nightowl_games wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that and I don't like this assumption that only 'managers' make mistakes, or that software engineers are always right. I thinks needlessly adversarial, biased and largely incorrect.

Spoken like a manager. Look, when you're barking orders at the guys in the trenches who, understandably in fear for their jobs, do the stupid "business-smart" thing, then it is entirely the fault of management. I can't tell you how many times just in the last year I've been blamed-by-proxy for doing something that was decreed upon me by some moron in a corner office. Everything is an emergency, everything needs to be…

I don't think either of your jobs are getting shipped overseas.

> Thank god there's no malpractice law in software.

This is aerospace, there are such things, but there's also blameless postmortems. And it happened overseas!

Re: Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

#166

Post by astrange »

yongjik wrote: post #63
ipunchghosts wrote: post #8

Title should be nmi

NGL, two locations 3600 non-maskable interrupts apart would have been a much more interesting story.

It's like doing the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs.

Re: Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

#167

Post by ggm »

kccqzy wrote: post #163
ggm wrote: post #156

Could you front-end the software with a proxy which bounces code-collision requests and limit the damage to the specific route, and not the entire systems integrity? This is hack-on-hack stuff, but I am wondering if there is a low cost fix for a design behaviour which can't alter without every airline, every other airline system worldwide, accommodating the changes to remove 3-letter code collision. Gate the problem.…

The low cost fix is to fix the FPRSA-R software. The front-end proxy cannot easily detect code collisions because such code collisions are not readily apparent. The ICAO flight plan allows omitting waypoints and it is one of the omitted waypoint that collides with a non-omitted waypoint. If you have taken the trouble of introducing such a sophisticated code collision detection in the front-end proxy, you might as wel…

My primary fear was the compliance issues re-coding the real s/w would drive this into the ground, where the compliance for a front fix might be lower. You could hash-map the collisions seen before and drive them to a "don't do that" and reduce the risk to new ones.

"we fall over far less often now"

Thank you for neg votes kind strangers. Remember ATC is rife with historical kludges, including using whiteout on the giant green screens to make the phosphor get ignored by the light gun. This is an industry addicted to backwards compatibility to the point that you can buy dongle adapters for dot-matrix printers at every gate, such that they don't have to replace the printer but can back-end the faster network into it.

C/F rebooting a 787 inside the maximum-days-without-a-reboot

Re: Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

#168

Post by Moru »

skissane wrote: post #131
throw0101a wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> C dev: "You are telling me that the three digit codes are not globally unique??? They are understood not to be. They are generally known to be regionally unique. The "DVL" code is unique with-in FAA/Transport Canada control, and the "DVL" is unique with-in EASA space. There are pre-defined three-letter codes: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IATA_airport_code And pre-defined four-letter codes: * https://en.wikipedia…

> They are understood not to be. They are generally known to be regionally unique. Then why aren’t they namespaced? Attach to each code its issuing authority, so it is obvious to the code that DVL@FAA and DVL@EASA are two different things? Maybe for backward compatibility/ human factors reasons, the code needs to be displayed without the namespace to pilots and air traffic controllers, but it should be a field in the…

Some history/explanation [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948915

Re: Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

#169

Post by marcosdumay »

skissane wrote: post #132
marcosdumay wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hum... Somebody has a list of foreign local-codes sharing the same space as the local ones? I assumed IATA messed up, not I'm wondering how that even happens. It's not even easy to discover the local codes of remote aviation authorities.

> I assumed IATA messed up, This isn’t IATA. IATA manages codes used for passenger and cargo bookings, which are distinct from the codes used by pilots and air traffic control we are talking about here-ultimately overseen by ICAO. These codes include a lot of stuff which is irrelevant to passengers/freight, such as navigation waypoints, military airbases (which normally would never accept a civilian flight, but still…

Hum, no. It's not about ICAO codes. It's about local UK codes, and IATA ones used by mistake.

Re: Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code

#170

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

So, exactly the same airline (French Bee) and exactly the same route (LAX-ORY) and exactly the same waypoint (DVL) as last September, resulting in exactly the same failure mode:

https://chaos.social/@russss/111048524540643971

Time to tick that "repeat incident?" box in the incident management system, guys.

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