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FDPS Problem on Friday 20 August 2010 at Maastricht UAC http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/...h/7hwy7at6.gif

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EUROCONTROL

This is what exactly happened last week in MUAC when they suffered equipment problems:

On 20 August 2010, at 14:37 CET EUROCONTROL's Upper Area Control Centre in Maastricht, providing air navigation services to the upper airspace (above 24,500 feet) of Belgium, North-West Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, suffered equipment problems.

As a result capacity was reduced and air traffic flow and capacity management measures introduced (70% reduction at 14:45, reduced to 50% at 15:23 and 30% at 15:57). At 15:20 gradual recovery started resulting in normal capacity at 16:21 (CET).

Total delay for the situation was 9367 minutes.

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 modification was activated on the tracker on 25 August to mitigate the issue and to prevent last Friday's problem from occuring again. A software solution will be implemented after extensive testing on 9 September 2010, to definitively prevent this type of occurrence from re-occurring.

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