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Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

nco.ncep.noaa.gov

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Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#91

Post by flanbiscuit »

flerchin wrote: post #2

SENIOR DUTY METEOROLOGIST NWS ADMINISTRATIVE MESSAGE NWS NCEP CENTRAL OPERATIONS COLLEGE PARK MD 1120Z THU JAN 19 2023 ...METAR OUTAGE... AOMC reported that there is a metar outage going on...167 missing sites at last check. The FAA is investigating the issue.

> 167 missing sites at last check.

That seems like a lot but curious to know what percentage of their total sites this is.

I think I found the full list here: https://www.aviationweather.gov/docs/metar/stations.txt

This list is worldwide and I see no information about this outage being region specific so I'll assume it's worldwide.

Seems like they have about 9,517 sites so this is about 1.75% of their sites worldwide

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#93

Post by mvgoogler »

Full list of reporting stations is here: https://www.aviationweather.gov/docs/metar/stations.txt

The report is that 167 are missing.

That would be roughly 5% of US stations or 0.2% of worldwide stations.

I was able to look up meters for airports that I'm familiar with. https://www.aviationweather.gov/metar

So, it is real but far from a total collapse of the system.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#94

Post by pookha »

acdha wrote: post #62
trollied wrote: post #6

Has anything happened regarding IT staffing at the FAA recently? There was the NOTAM outage last week [1], and now this! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34337158

The NOTAM system was apparently running on old SPARC hardware so I’d easily believe that they haven’t been given enough budget to hire engineers and are basically keeping the lights on. One peril of the government funding model is that it’s effective at shoveling money to contracting companies but not having skilled oversight, so you tend to see lots of big projects which founder under their own weight.

NOTAM could be run from a pre-historic Toshiba mainframe. it's static. Doesn't need billions in funding.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#96

Post by krisoft »

envyac wrote: post #67
trollied wrote: post #6

Has anything happened regarding IT staffing at the FAA recently? There was the NOTAM outage last week [1], and now this! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34337158

You mean besides the last three years of reduced on-site staffing, and employee travel to support maintenance and modernization? No. $5 says this is the XKCD for this. Corrupted DB file was the culprit, as announced by the FAA. It's a system that relies on user inputs, often manual, and it's all being put into a database. My bet is a user decided to put in a bunch of "fun characters" to make their input easier to rea…

> You can't account for and sanitize all levels of stupidity on user inputs.

That is false and a defeatist attitude.

Sanitization is not the right solution anyway. If you are working with any form of a database and don't know from the top of your head how to avoid query injection attacks then you should look up in the manual of your database. The solution is most often called "parameterized query" or something similar.

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#97

Post by gretch »

mardifoufs wrote: post #78
flandish wrote: post #47

Just gotta ask: Southwest, NOTAM, and now this… Is some group pen-testing?

It's weird that americans always seem to have this sort of siege mentality. We already know the causes of the other outages, and they have nothing to do with the foreign interference boogeyman.

Are you so sure you have 0 people of this type in [country you are from]?

Are you sure you are not seeing selection bias because the majority of users on this site are Americans?

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#98

Post by daenney »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #91
flerchin wrote: post #2

SENIOR DUTY METEOROLOGIST NWS ADMINISTRATIVE MESSAGE NWS NCEP CENTRAL OPERATIONS COLLEGE PARK MD 1120Z THU JAN 19 2023 ...METAR OUTAGE... AOMC reported that there is a metar outage going on...167 missing sites at last check. The FAA is investigating the issue.

> 167 missing sites at last check. That seems like a lot but curious to know what percentage of their total sites this is. I think I found the full list here: https://www.aviationweather.gov/docs/metar/stations.txt This list is worldwide and I see no information about this outage being region specific so I'll assume it's worldwide. Seems like they have about 9,517 sites so this is about 1.75% of their sites worldwide

You should not assume it's world wide. Given "the FAA is investigating" and there's no reports of other countries it's reasonable to assume that this is limited to the US, or at least northern continental America.

(The title of the submission is also "Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage")

Re: Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

#100

Post by flandish »

mardifoufs wrote: post #78
flandish wrote: post #47

Just gotta ask: Southwest, NOTAM, and now this… Is some group pen-testing?

It's weird that americans always seem to have this sort of siege mentality. We already know the causes of the other outages, and they have nothing to do with the foreign interference boogeyman.

Why do you assume I am American? Or are you speaking generally?

“We” don’t know the causes, only what was reported.

I’ve worked on a lot of old systems needing to be updated, migrated, or sunset. For sure it’s 99% of the time due to management being lazy. I get that.

And I know correlation/causation, but hey my orig comment was a simple curiosity.

Sure, my nature distrusts what a corporation says because it’s always filtered through stockholder functions, but I still think “3 major airline issues in as many months” is kind of hilarious. Even if they seem to be in different facets.

Does this happen often but only now is it reported to “us”? Or is this truly an odd and rare timing?

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