OK Buttons, you found me out! But only a bit of a wind up. Prof Finklestein is real enough and so is his paper. I just figured that with all this Y2K angst it was time to remember that there are two sides to every equation.
Actually pilots using Honeywell Flight Management Systems will see Y2K effects over the next 12 months. Those with older 270K Nav Databases will get a screwed up date display from midnight 31 December while those using the 1 Meg Database with "PIP" Operating Software will start getting nuisnace "Nav Data Out of Date" messages at power up from 01 January 2001. There is no fix for the first problem, you've just got to live with it. Honeywell promise a software fix sometime before the end of 2000 for the second. In any case, there are no operational effects, all Honeywell FMCs continue to navigate properly. There are a few other sytems which have Y2K effects, all of them nuisance level with no operational effects. The thing to remember is that you musn't get wound up about computers crashing all over the place. My PC at the office returns to 04 April 1980 at the stroke of midnight and some of the software will screw up, but that's not the same as the utter devastation that a lot of people are expecting. All (almost all) Y2K effects are fixable and should be no more than a nuisance. There are plenty of work around solutions available either for free or quite cheap all over the place.
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Don't Panic Mr. Mainwaring!!!!!