The West Drayton power system was far too complicated and those who designed the system at Swanwick certainly learned from the experiences of total loss at WD.
The classic WD failure happened when one of the Uninterruptible Power Supplies was taken out for maintenance and no-one had checked to see what the load was on the remaining three. Unfortunately, the load wasn't balanced and one of the remaining units overloaded and tripped out. Of course, care had been taken to ensure that any failure would only take out every other radar display. Care had also been taken to ensure that any failure would also only take out every other RDP computer. HOWEVER, no-one had ensured that the displays which stayed on were attached to the computers that stayed on ...
Last edited by PeltonLevel; 24th April 2009 at 14:03.