UK Controllers Say Air Traffic System 'Not Safe'

Jack Spine writes "Air traffic control technology being implemented in one of the major transport hubs in the UK is 'not safe,' according to air traffic controllers. The electronic flight data system (EFD) being phased in at Glasgow Prestwick Airport is too slow to handle real-time inputs, and could not cope with an outage that isolated it from the main air traffic system. Controllers had to scramble to handle the situation. Good luck if you're traveling to the UK anytime soon."

Made the mistake.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I made the stupid mistake of actually reading the fine article. It seems to suggest that the old system of using paper strips and flight names is faster, more reliable and has bigger capacity to handle real time input than the new one based on computers and "smart stripes". Should have waited for people to read and post comments, that way some kind soul would have posted something easier to understand.

"java"

[rubycodez]

the new system runs Linux, but the article also says "java". no surprise that a j2ee system would turn out be a bloated, slow steaming pile of dung. Sure, efficient coding can be done in Java, but far too often too many layers of canned commercial libraries from a certain j2ee framework vendor are employed

Re:"java"

[trollertron3000]

This can be true but a language doesn't design a bad system, a software engineer does. Many reliable systems have been built using Java and reside in hospitals, transportation, and power infrastructure. I can't blame a language or runtime for piss poor design. Also keep in mind not all Java applications or runtimes are the same.

Searching for more on this issue I found a post on how ATC insiders view it on the PPrune forums (UK site for professional pilots): http://www.pprune.org/atc-issues/427001-efd-scottish.html [pprune.org]

Kind of an interesting behind the scenes look.

Re:You can tape my punchtape when you pry it...

[natehoy]

Not ticker tape. A Flight Progress strip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_progress_strip [wikipedia.org]

"Old-school" controlling uses strips of paper. When a flight comes under your control, you grab a strip of paper and write the flight number on it. You stick it up on a board in front of you. When a flight gets near leaving your zone of control, you tell them to contact the next controller, and you physically hand the strip of paper to that controller or have a flunky run it down for you. Then when the pilot calls that controller, the controller is expecting the call (and if the pilot never calls the controller, the controller knows the pilot has screwed up his frequencies or made an error).

This is called "handing off" a flight, and handing the strip of paper over is the origination of that term.

And the problem here is not training the controllers to use the system. The problem is that the fancy new system had a tendency to slow down or fail, meaning the controllers needed to fall back on the strips of paper.