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> Bret Peyton, Alaska’s on-duty director of operations, immediately ordered no more planes were to take off across the airline’s network. All Alaska flights not
by 015a 4y ago
> Bret Peyton, Alaska’s on-duty director of operations, immediately ordered no more planes were to take off across the airline’s network. All Alaska flights not already airborne were stopped nationwide.
An absolute pro. There's a hundred variations of this story, to varying degrees of criticality and impact; seeing a pattern out of two data points, connecting the dots, making the tremendous call to immediately pull the plug, to stop the world and give engineering time, then diagnosing and triaging the problem in less than a half hour; that's world class reliability engineering.
- raldi 4y agoYes. Even better if there are situations declared in advance to be automatic halts so no call needs to be made in the moment.
- hef19898 4y agoNo matter what complex system it is, you always need humans in the loop. Especially for networks and not just single nodes.
- raldi 4y agoI think you misunderstand my comment. I'm saying, for instance, that during a calm period when a group of people can take their time and review each other's reasoning, a rule might be put in effect like, "Two tail strikes within X hours of each other means an automatic, immediate halt." Humans execute that procedure (or override it at the risk of their career) and then decide what to do next, having been in the loop the entire time. Such a rule likely saved an SR-71 once: https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-story-of-belmont-86-the-sr-71-that-made-an-emergency-landing-in-norway-after-spying-over-murmansk/ https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-story-of-belmont-86-the-... The natural tendency for military air crews is to complete the mission if humanly possible. To counter this inclination, the Wing Commander had designated certain emergencies sufficiently critical to require immediate landing. This was one of those emergencies.