Originally Posted by
eglnyt
If I have the World's most sophisticated system & it cost me, for the sake of argument, £500 million, a truly independent backup would more than double that cost even if you could get 2 capable of handling all the traffic. So I go to the two very vocal Irishmen & tell them I want to double the bit of their fees that cover systems & interest on capital investment to avoid a disruption every 10 years or so but I can't guarantee that there will never be any disruption even if I spend that money. What do you think their response would be?
Never listen to the very vocal Irishmen, if you follow their logic, that of MOL at least , we should all work 12h a day . 7 days a week for half of the money so that his airline can make more profit. But on cost of back up systems you take the problem the wrong way . a functioning back up in an ATC Centre is part of the system , from the outset and this regardless of the end price. . You do not buy a system and later ask for a back up.
That said, today if you have a very stable modern advanced system build bay any of the well known established manufacturers , with good preventive maintenance and well paid technical staff doing the upgrades when necessary your back up system is likely to be used only some minutes a year. Also we do not have back up system to only maintain capacity, it is primarily to maintain the same level of safety. In ATC we are in the safety business, even if our vocal Irishmen claim we are there to provide endless capacity and no delays.
In this incident safety was not compromised ( at least as far as I heard) , it caused delays, diversions and cancellations , but this is a capacity consequence , not a safety one.,
What caused the system to crash is not really the important issue, Nice to know to learn and prevent it from happening again , but why it took so long to restart the primary system is the question I would like to ask if I had the chance.