3 ms·

not stronger isolation between different flight plans? it seems "obvious" to me that if one flight plan is causing a bug in the handling logic, the system shoul

not stronger isolation between different flight plans? it seems "obvious" to me that if one flight plan is causing a bug in the handling logic, the system should be able to recover by continuing with the next flight plan and flagging the error to operators to impact that flight only

WalterBright 3y ago
"unexpected errors" are not necessarily problems with the flight plans. They could be anything.
xp84 3y ago
I'm no aviation expert, but perhaps with waypoints: A B C D E / F G H I J If flight plan #1 is known to be going from F-B at flight level 130, and you have a (supposedly) bogus flight plan #2, they can't quite be sure if it might be going from A-G at flight level 130 at the same time and thus causing a really bad day for both aircraft. I'd worry that dropping plan #2 into a queue for manual intervention, especially if this kind of thing only happens once every 5 years, could be disastrous if people don't realize what's happening and why. Many people might never have seen anything in that queue and may not be trained to diagnose the problem and manually translate the flight plan. This might not be the reason why the developer chose to have the program essentially pull the fire alarm and go home in this case, but that's the impression I got.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  The ATC system handled well enough (i.e. no disasters, and AFAIK, no near misses) something much more complicated than one aircraft showing up with no flight plan: the failure of this particular system put all the flights in that category. I mentioned elsewhere that any ATC system has to be resilient enough to handle things like in-flight equipment failure, medical emergencies, and the diversion of multiple aircraft on account of bad weather or an incident which shuts down a major airport. As for why the system "pulled the plug", the author of the article suspects that this particular error was regarded as something that would not occur unless something catastrophic had caused it, whereas, in reality, it affected only one flight and could probably have been easily worked around if the system had informed ATC which flight plan was causing the problem.
- bdavbdav 3y ago
  I'm not sure they're even used for that purpose - that side of thing is done "live" as I understand it - the plans are so that ATC has the details on hand for each flight and it doesn't all need to be communicated by radio as they pass through.

WalterBright 3y ago

"unexpected errors" are not necessarily problems with the flight plans. They could be anything.

xp84 3y ago

I'm no aviation expert, but perhaps with waypoints: A B C D E / F G H I J If flight plan #1 is known to be going from F-B at flight level 130, and you have a (supposedly) bogus flight plan #2, they can't quite be sure if it might be going from A-G at flight level 130 at the same time and thus causing a really bad day for both aircraft. I'd worry that dropping plan #2 into a queue for manual intervention, especially if this kind of thing only happens once every 5 years, could be disastrous if people don't realize what's happening and why. Many people might never have seen anything in that queue and may not be trained to diagnose the problem and manually translate the flight plan. This might not be the reason why the developer chose to have the program essentially pull the fire alarm and go home in this case, but that's the impression I got.

mannykannot 3y ago
The ATC system handled well enough (i.e. no disasters, and AFAIK, no near misses) something much more complicated than one aircraft showing up with no flight plan: the failure of this particular system put all the flights in that category. I mentioned elsewhere that any ATC system has to be resilient enough to handle things like in-flight equipment failure, medical emergencies, and the diversion of multiple aircraft on account of bad weather or an incident which shuts down a major airport. As for why the system "pulled the plug", the author of the article suspects that this particular error was regarded as something that would not occur unless something catastrophic had caused it, whereas, in reality, it affected only one flight and could probably have been easily worked around if the system had informed ATC which flight plan was causing the problem.
bdavbdav 3y ago
I'm not sure they're even used for that purpose - that side of thing is done "live" as I understand it - the plans are so that ATC has the details on hand for each flight and it doesn't all need to be communicated by radio as they pass through.