Originally Posted by
Downwind Lander
What is needed is a serious level IT expert to be ready to comment on technical explanations as they come through. Any offers?
Not quite up to such a grandiose introduction, but nevertheless ......
Everyone seems to blame it on "the computer" but there is no really understandable technical description being offered so difficult to comment. And "it's old" is certainly not a technical description - what is needed for such is an explanation of why it has worked satisfactorily for so long before encountering an issue, and what caused the issue to manifest itself now.
But that's tech. As I understand it there was an outage for an hour or so. Aviation is of course well used to hour-long holdups for a wide variety of reasons. What REALLY needs to be investigated is why it then took so long for normality to be restored - there were still significant BA cancellations the following day.
This is something which increasingly afflicts not only aviation but also other transport modes like rail or road, the length of time taken to recover the service from an incident going ever upwards. It seems that NATS have been on a substantial staff reduction exercise; it is moments like this when you find out that those staff were actually doing something. Likewise for the airlines, the inability by some (not all) to have the resilience to come back from the various situations is one for them, not something to be just stuck on the ATC provider. The ability to blame it on "knock-on effect" is a glorious excuse for slowness and inertia rather than trying really hard to get things back straight again quickly. And that's nothing to do with computers.
Most notable of all is all the calls in the press for "investment" in replacement computers. Goodness me, the IT salesmen (
) must be smacking their lips at this early Christmas present, and some little placings by their
PR teams with the media contacts whilst this is Hot News doubtless works wonders as well. Time and again the high-level know-nothings get themselves talked into spending money on new kit rather than dealing with the operational procedures and management which are the real issue. It's just like airport security. 10 security stations provided of which only 3 are staffed even at peak times, and a 30-minute queue. After many complaints, what's the solution ? More security stations, of course.