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Old 23rd Nov 2010, 18:00
  #11 (permalink)  
winchman41
 
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Germany
Age: 73
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Crazy Voyager

whilst I fully agree about the rush of adrenalin in controllers' bodies when a technical "mishap" occurs other than in the middle of the night, please allow me to clarify a little item in your quote of "eurocontrols radars went black".

"The Flight Data Processing System keeps track of all flights contained in its radar coverage. There is a technical limitation in a part of the system for keeping track of flights on the same SSR code. The system was tracking too many identical transponders codes, resulting in many error messages. The system reported these error messages constantly, eventually enough to block the "heartbeat" message getting to the LMCF (Local Monitoring and Control Function). The LMCF automatically monitors the health of Maastricht systems and initiated a FDPS kernel swap-over and restart. The standby kernel suffered the same fate, forcing the use of the backup system.

After identifying the reason for the crash, a filter was activated on the tracker to mitigate the issue. A software solution will prevent this type of occurrence from re-occurring.
"

Although the main system there is already a doubled one, this did not help here for obvious reasons. Therefore, controllers at Maastricht UAC (MUAC) have additionally a completely independent Fall-Back system synchronized with the primary system at immediate use available (it receives track and FPL info from the main system until the moment of switch over) . And are regularly operating on this Fall-Back system to maintain proficiency!
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