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UK air traffic control meltdown

jameshaydon.github.io

361–370 of 459 posts

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pilots occasionally have to fat finger them into ruggedized I/O devices you're saying what-3-words (W3W) is unsuitable for safety critical applications ? /s

I'm trying to imagine someone ensuring differentiation between minimums.unsettled.depends (Idaho), minimums.unsettled.depend (Alaska), minimums.unsettles.depend (Spain), and minimum.unsettles.depend (Russia) while typing them in on a t-9 style keypad with a 7 figure display in turbulence.

I can't believe the What3Words person or people didn't normalize all words to be singular before canonizing the list.

That's ridiculous.

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so why the 4 hour lead time To answer your question without conspiracy drivel, let's look up CAP 694: The UK Flight Planning Guide [0] Chapter 1 > 6.1 The general ICAO requirement is that FPLs should be filed on the ground at least 60 minutes before clearance to start-up or taxi is requested. The "Estimated Off Block Time" (EOBT) is used as the planned departure time in flight planning, not the planned airborne tim…

So on point 3 then, why do countries, turn people away at the destination and not before take off, if their visa or passport is not in order? Are their systems not joined up, or does the state just like making examples of peoples once on the destination country? I can watch this stuff happening to people at airport border controls on TV all the time so which is it? Their systems are not joined up or they just like ma…

Airline employees routinely turn people away at the departure airport due to visa/passport paperwork not being in order. Timatic is the usual system that most airlines subscribe to for this kind of thing. Airlines are highly incented to avoid letting a passenger board who won't be admitted, because they're on the hook for returning that passenger. But an airline employee in at the departure airport is never going to be able to be a perfect proxy for an immigration officer in every country they fly to, and immigration officers generally have wide latitude in who they accept/reject. It is extremely possible that all your paperwork is in order but the immigration control officer rejects you for other reasons.

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a huge flaw in their system, has it never been addressed?

No, and by my understanding it can't be, as the algorithm is now permanent. But it's worse than that, there are confusables within small distances of each other: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su... https://w3w.me.ss/

Since the app gives you the words to say, and translates those back to coordinates on the receiving end, in theory they could alter the word list, at the cost of making any written-down version obsolete.

Maybe they should release a new service called What4ActuallyVettedWordsAndWordCombinations ;)

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pilots occasionally have to fat finger them into ruggedized I/O devices you're saying what-3-words (W3W) is unsuitable for safety critical applications ? /s

Something like what3words might be useful, but what3words itself doesn't have enough "auditory distance" between words. (i.e. - there are some/many words used by what3words that sound similar enough to be indistinguishable over an audio channel with noise.) Something like FixPhrase seems better for use over radio.

There are a number of word lists whose words were picked due to their beneficial properties given the use-case of possibly needing to be understood verbally over unclear connections. The NATO phonetic alphabet, and PGP word lists come to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list

I'm particularly a fan of the PGP word list (it would definitely require more than 3 words for this purpose, though) because it has built-in error detection (of transposition, insertion or deletion): Separate word lists are used for "even" and "odd" hex digits. This makes it, IMHO, fairly ideal for use over verbal channels. From the wiki: "The words were carefully chosen for their phonetic distinctiveness, using genetic algorithms to select lists of words that had optimum separations in phoneme space"

It sounds like the w3w folks did not do any such thing

EDIT: According to my napkin math, 6 PGP words should be enough to cover the 64 trillion coordinates that "what3words" covers, but with way better properties such as error detection and phonetic incongruity (and not only that, it is just over 4 times larger, which means it can achieve a resolution of 5 feet instead of 10)

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#365

I wish the article contained some explanation of why the processing for NATS requires looking at both the ADEXP waypoints and the ICAO4444 waypoints (not a criticism per se, it may not have been addressed in the underlying report). Just looking at the ADEXP seems sufficient for the UK segment logic. I'm guessing it has something to do with how ICAO4444 is technically human readable, and how in some meaningful sense,…

They use the ADEXP to determine which part of the route is in the UK. Because the auto generated points are ATC area handover points. So this data is the best way so see which part of the route is within the UK airspace. Then it needs to find the ICAO part that corresponds, because the controller needs to use the ICAO plan that the pilot has. If the controller sees other (auto generated) waypoints that the pilots don…

Thanks for this explanation. So, is the ICAO plan in some sense the "single source of truth", being the international standard and all?

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to imagine someone ensuring differentiation between minimums.unsettled.depends (Idaho), minimums.unsettled.depend (Alaska), minimums.unsettles.depend (Spain), and minimum.unsettles.depend (Russia) while typing them in on a t-9 style keypad with a 7 figure display in turbulence.

I can't believe the What3Words person or people didn't normalize all words to be singular before canonizing the list. That's ridiculous.

The word list is 40,000 long, so without plurals probably there aren't enough words that people could spell or even pronounce. A better fix would be making it "what four words" - I wonder if they'd already committed too much to the "three" concept before discovering the flaw? Either way, using phony statistics to make unwarrantable claims of accuracy is a poor workaround.

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like what3words might be useful, but what3words itself doesn't have enough "auditory distance" between words. (i.e. - there are some/many words used by what3words that sound similar enough to be indistinguishable over an audio channel with noise.) Something like FixPhrase seems better for use over radio.

There are a number of word lists whose words were picked due to their beneficial properties given the use-case of possibly needing to be understood verbally over unclear connections. The NATO phonetic alphabet, and PGP word lists come to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list I'm particularly a fan of the PGP word list (it would definitely require more than 3 words for this purpose, though) because it has…

> I'm particularly a fan of the PGP word list

As a New Zealander, the PGP list is unfriendly because there are plenty of words that are hard to spell, or are too US centric.

dogsled (contains silent d, and sleigh might be a British spelling)

Galveston (I've never heard of the place)

Geiger (easy to type i before e - unobvious)

Wichita (I would have guessed the spelling began with which or witch)

And why did the designers not make the words have some connection to the numbers e.g. there are 12 even and 12 odd words beginning with E - add 16 more E words and you could use E words for E0 to EF. Redundant encoding like that helps humans (and would help when scanning for errors or matches too)

I imagine it is even harder for ESOL people from other countries! I am sure the UI has completion to help - but I wouldn't recommend using that list for anything except a pure US audience.

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#368
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What three words would be a better solution than a guid, as transmittable over radio.

I always love it when someone helicopters in to a complex, long-established system and, without even attempting to understand the requirements, constraints or history, knows this thing they read on a blog one time would fix all the problems thousands of work-years have failed to address.

As software developers, we are often living in our own bubble. As a pilot and developer working on an aviation solution, I quite often run into this issue when discussing solutions with my colleagues.

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#369
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different teams often make the same mistake. The system you describe is not perfect, but makes sense.

if this is true, then would it be a better investment to have the 2nd team produce a fuzz testing/systematic testing mechanism instead of producing a secondary copy of the same system? In fact, make it adversarial testing such that this team is rewarded (may be financially) if mistakes or problems are found from the 1st team's program.

Such incentives can lead to reduced collaboration. If I get paid every time you make mistakes, I won't want you to get better at your job

Re: UK air traffic control meltdown

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving up if something doesn't validate is indeed standard to avoid propagating badly interpreted data, causing far more complex bugs down the line. Validate soon, validate strongly, report errors and don't try to interpret whatever the hell is wrong with the input, don't try to be 'clever', because there lie the safety holes. Crashing on bad input is wrong, but trying to interpret data that doesn't validate, without…

There's a difference between parsing and validating . https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-va... You're right about all the buggy stuff out there, and that nobody wants to pay to make it better, though.

From a safety-critical standpoint, I've always found this article interesting but strange. You want both, before taking into account any data from anything outside of the system. Do both. As soon as possible. Don't propagate data you haven't validated in any way your spec says so. If you have more stringent specs than any standard you're using, be explicit about it, reject the data with a clear failure report. Check for anything that could be corrupted, misformated, something that you're not expecting and could cause unexpected behaviour.

I feel the lack of investment in destroying the parsing- (and validation-) related classes of bugs is the worst oversight in the history of computing. We have the tools to build crash-proof parsers (spark, Frama-C, and custom model checked code generators such as recordflux) that - not being perfect in any way - if they had a tiny bit of the effort the security industry put in mending all the 'Postel's law' junk out there, we'd be working on other stuff.

I built, with an intern, an in-house bit-precise code generator for deserializers that can be proved absent of runtime errors, and am moving to semantics checks ('field X and field Y can only present together', or 'field Y must be greater or equal to the previous time field Y was present'). It's not that hard, compared to many other proof and safety/security endeavours.

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