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> Air traffic control systems should at least be 2oo3... Human backup is not possible because of human resourcing and complexity. But this was a 1oo1 system, a

> Air traffic control systems should at least be 2oo3... Human backup is not possible because of human resourcing and complexity. But this was a 1oo1 system, and the human backup handled it well enough: a lot of people were inconvenienced, but there were no catastrophes, and (AFAIK) nothing that got close to being one. As for the benefits of independent development: it might have helped, but the chances of this being so are probably not as much as one would have hoped if one thought programming errors are essentially random defects analogous to, say, weaknesses in a bundle of cables; I had a bit more to say about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476624

justinclift 3y ago
> But this was a 1oo1 system, and the human backup handled it well enough ... Heh, a hundred million pound outage. ;) True, no-one seems to have died from it directly though.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  True. I don't want to downplay the actual cost (or, worse, suggest that we should accept "the system worked as intended" excuses), but it's not just that there were no crashes: the air traffic itself remained under control throughout the event. Compare this to, for example, the financial "flash crash" of 2010, or the nuclear 'excursions' at Fukushima / Chernobyl / Three Mile Island / Windscale, where those nominally in control were reduced to being passive observers. It also serves as a reminder of how far we have to go before we can automate away the jobs of pilots and air traffic controllers.