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United States Transportation Technology

US Switches Air Traffic Control To New Computer System 160

Posted by samzenpus from the upgrade-complete dept.
coondoggie writes: The Federal Aviation Administration this week said it had completed the momentous replacement of the 40-year-old main computer systems that control air traffic in the US. Known as En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM), the system is expected to increase air traffic flow, improve automated navigation and strengthen aircraft conflict detection services, with the end result being increased safety and less flight congestion. The FAA said the Lockheed Martin-developed ERAM systems “uses nearly two million lines of computer code to process critical data for controllers, including aircraft identity, altitude, speed, and flight path. The system almost doubles the number of flights that can be tracked and displayed to controllers.”
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US Switches Air Traffic Control To New Computer System More

US Switches Air Traffic Control To New Computer System

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  • For delays and glitches...

    • Re:Prepare (Score:5, Informative)

      by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:37PM (#49590965)
      The system has been rolled out one center at a time over the past several years. This article is just stating that the last center has been converted and the transition from HOST to ERAM is complete. That's not to say that there weren't glitches along the way. [arstechnica.com]

      • The article you're pointing to was about how one of the ERAM systems crashed trying to cope with a bizarre flight plan for a U-2 spy plane.

        When I was working on AAS in the late 80s, one thing I was mildly concerned about was that the planned "upgrade" our project was trying to design wouldn't really be able to cope with super-sonic aircraft over the continental US. The requirements for how much area had to show on a controller's screen and how fast the radar sweeps were meant that anything at Concorde spee

    • Back in the 1980s, the FAA's shiny new Advanced Automation System project (AAS) was being designed to replace the 1960s-vintage En-Route system, which used IBM 360/90 and 360/50 computers that were getting to be old, unmaintainable, and unreplaceable. (It was getting hard to even get cable connectors for components - imagine coming up with new SCSI-1 terminators these days.)

      As with many military aircraft system contracts, they ran a design competition, which had funneled down from 4 bidders to two by the t

  • Uh, only doubled? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:10PM (#49590871)

    So how does a 40 year old computer system get replaced and only doubles the number of flights capable of being tracked?

    • Re:Uh, only doubled? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Feral Nerd ( 3929873 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:14PM (#49590893)

      So how does a 40 year old computer system get replaced and only doubles the number of flights capable of being tracked?

      Very very slowly and at great expense.

    • Re:Uh, only doubled? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:26PM (#49590919) Homepage

      So how does a 40 year old computer system get replaced and only doubles the number of flights capable of being tracked?

      How about this concept: Maybe that is all that they set it up for. The rate limiting step of the Airway Traffic Control system just might be somewhere else so there would be no need to do anything else.

      I do find it concerning that the system comprises of 'two million lines of code'. Last time I heard that metric was "Jurassic Park". And we know how well that turned out.

      • Re:Uh, only doubled? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:55PM (#49591033)

        The rate limiting step of the Airway Traffic Control system just might be somewhere else so there would be no need to do anything else.

        Just off the top of my head, major limiting factors are runways to get the flights into and out of the air, passenger demand, and the number of air traffic controllers. And like most projects, the cost and effort to scale rises dramatically with the amount of scale you target. Besides, if the system is anything like the air traffic management system I worked on, then it should scale much better than the system it replaced.

        I do find it concerning that the system comprises of 'two million lines of code'.

        The software on the plane has more lines of code than that and some of that code actually controls the plane, auto-negotiate collision avoidance, etc. I'd be more worried about that - if ERAM goes down for a brief period, controllers wouldn't be able to see flights, but those aircraft would be able to maintain control of their aircraft until ERAM came back up. If the flight's control system went, then the traffic controller would only be able to watch the flight as it hurtled out of control.

      • Re:Uh, only doubled? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Zaelath ( 2588189 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @12:44AM (#49591369)

        One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

        - Ken Thompson

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I do find it concerning that the system comprises of 'two million lines of code'. Last time I heard that metric was "Jurassic Park". And we know how well that turned out.

        Marketing wank. They added up all the lines from everything, including the firmware in the mouse and the windows.h header file that is 99.9% irrelevant to their project, included all the comments, treated every "\r\n" as two lines, and threw in the Linux kernel for good measure because their office wifi router runs that.

        I really doubt that the actual ATC system is 2 million lines, not least because it would be extremely difficult to audit.

        • You did get the bit about how this system was decades behind schedule and tens or hundreds of billions over budget, with a couple of major iterations thrown away in the process? 2MLOC sounds nice, clean, compact, and surprisingly low.

    • Re:Uh, only doubled? (Score:5, Funny)

      by lucm ( 889690 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:39PM (#49590971)

      So how does a 40 year old computer system get replaced and only doubles the number of flights capable of being tracked?

      They switched from 7-bit ASCII to 8-bit ASCII...

    • Re:Uh, only doubled? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:57PM (#49591045) Homepage Journal

      So how does a 40 year old computer system get replaced and only doubles the number of flights capable of being tracked?

      Tracking double the number of flights likely requires about 4x the about of computing power. A naive comparison grows at a rate of (n)(n-1)/2. You might be able to reduce that by not comparing aircraft that aren't going to be anywhere near each other (e.g. a plane in Washington D.C. cannot readily crash into a plane in Los Angeles, CA until they get close to halfway across the country), but still....

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It's amazing computing power has increased by as much as four times since 1970!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's more likely a limitation of the hardware they use to track and communicate with aircraft. There are only so many radio channels, so many radar installations, so much bandwidth available. Many of the comms protocols used are ancient and can't easily be replaced by more efficient ones.

    • "So how does a 40 year old computer system get replaced and only doubles the number of flights capable of being tracked?"

      VMS simulators are not that fast, after all only planes and trains and a few factories use it.

    • So how does a 40 year old computer system get replaced and only doubles the number of flights capable of being tracked?

      I believe a clue can be found in the following choice quote:

      nearly two million lines of computer code

  • /me waits to hear that it's Windows-based...

    • Ada on AIX (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:40PM (#49590979)

      It's mostly Ada running on AIX. See http://www.iaeng.org/publication/IMECS2009/IMECS2009_pp1095-1099.pdf.

      "Display System (DS), User Requested Evaluation Tool (URET) and ERAM and have been developed mainly in the Ada programming language. " Page 2.

      "Product supportability advantages led to the selection of the IBM P series processors, the AIX operating system, and CISCO switches." Page 3.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It's mostly Ada running on AIX.

        The *backend* is mostly Ada running on AIX. The front end definitely is not. In the demo video they're running Internet Explorer to do conflict checking. Unless they're running it in Wine. :)

        • Just watched the video from the linked story
          There may have been a couple of applications running on windows to view the data, but the bulk of the screens that the controllers were staring at looked distinctly like x-windows
          I have to wonder how much they pay for those big square flat screens

  • Two million lines of code (Score:4, Funny)

    by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:29PM (#49590929)

    what could possibly go wrong?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Sandbox-Six-Actual ( 1028450 )

      Two million lines of code actually isn't that impressive, either for economy of code, or for scale of code, the two goals that you may publish such a statistic to support.

      Windows 8? 40 million lines.
      Quake 3 engine? 30 million lines.

      The government has just come out and told us that the scale of complexity in a system that "doubled" capacity and that they paid who knows how much for... has about the complexity of the average enterprise class iPhone application.

      • The average enterprise class iPhone application isn't trusted lives with. Also, not inside an industry where an accident means deaths of hundreds of people at once. Nobody brings the average car accident in the news, for example when somebody kills themselves at the highway. But when a plane crashes, it comes in the news, so politicians and representatives of the airlines promise they do something, and tighten regulations. Meanwhile, car security is still shit as hell.

        I guess its all formally proven. Is the

        • When it's connected to an implanted insulin pump, it's controlling lives pretty directly:

                                  http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Shakrai ( 717556 )

            In fairness, a screwed up insulin level won't immediately kill you and the symptoms are recognizable by anyone with an understanding of diabetes or basic first aid training. Your link says that blood tests are still needed and it sounds like that pump exists not to save life but to make it easier. When they're using iOS to run a pacemaker we can talk..... :)

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by cb88 ( 1410145 )
          One thing to keep in mind is that ADA is super verbose... much like its cousin VHDL.

          Mainly to aid in compile time detection of errors... I've never programmed in ADA but a little VHDL in school and it looks very familiar.

          And let me tell you... VHDL has the potential to be extremely verbose (behavioral models help as do other new features.. but thats off topic realy).

          • PL/SQL is a descendant of Ada. As a result I was involved in code review of a bunch of orbital mechanics code for y2k

            Sometimes its pascal-iness makes it seem like you are reading pseudo code

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by umghhh ( 965931 )
            Maybe they are similar I would not know but I object to this statement:

            I've never programmed in ADA but a little VHDL in school and it looks very familiar.

          • It's designed for object-oriented use, with lots of type specification and such upfront, to push decisions into upfront design time rather than coding time, and it's not as terse as C or APL, but it's nowhere near as verbose as COBOL. I wouldn't use it today (mostly because its main uses are for military stuff I won't do, and for antique maintenance, and it doesn't have all the friendly libraries that I'm used to and probably doesn't easily link to non-Ada systems), but it's a fairly cromulent language.

      • Lines of code = complexity?

        Lemme guess. You're a programmer.

        Ignat.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

        The average enterprise class iPhone application is nowhere near 2M LOC. You're off by at least one order of magnitude.

        • I make apps. I was converting a web app to cell phone app, and it was around 100,000 lines of code with the game + 2d level editor. I don't think it was any super achievement, but just something a guy like me can do in about a year.

          I think if you want to account for all sorts of things like weather, fuel of the planes cycling in the sky, collision pathing avoidance, and so on, it might be very complex. You factor in some functionality you can automate to make air traffic controller's lives less stres
          • My numbers on how many programming man hours it would take could be under by an order of magnitude or so due to the complicated nature of the software. And I didn't factor in all the other employees required in this huge task. Don't criticize me too hard on quickie back of the envelope calculations.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Shakrai ( 717556 )

      Two million lines of code what could possibly go wrong?

      Velociraptors? [google.com]

  • Oh... and you will need another entirely new system to accommodate drones.

  • Wait, you write a new application from the ground up to operate on new hardware, in an era of grid computing, ridiculous amounts of possible ram and multi-core compute nodes, with modern programming structures that can hold obscene amounts of data in a single variable.... and you only managed to "double" the number of flights which can be tracked and analyzed?

    • Well, yes, but keep in mind they started on this project 20 years ago. It's about time now to start on this new system's replacement, which is scheduled to go operational in 2035.

      • In some ways, I hope that you are joking about this. 20 years to deploy an application which tracks flight paths? Lets go crazy conservative. A year to write the app and 3 years of testing accross airports using parallel PoCs for integration UAT. Anything more than 5 or 6 is absurd @ 2 million lines of code, even if you credit a year or two for government scale requirements gathering.

        • Re:Only doubles?! (Score:5, Informative)

          by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @11:07PM (#49591083)
          You are insanely naive. You have no idea just how hard it is to build a safety-critical system on this scale. These systems have to be up nearly 24/7/365 and balance a ridiculous amount of data from redundant data sources while avoiding deadlocks and other sources of data contention. In addition to that, they undergo way more testing than you can imagine to ensure that the system handles those large volumes of data correctly and doesn't crash along the way. I used to think like you until I actually worked on an air traffic management system, so I can tell you that you can't possibly imagine how difficult it is until you actually do it.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by umghhh ( 965931 )
            You are right but also you miss some. YOu are spot on with quality of critical software - I used to work for a company producing telecom infrastructure. We were obliged by customers who were obliged by the states to produce software of good quality with low outage times and some odd characteristics. We paid hefty fines for outages and interoperability was a must. Over last few years I have moved away from that and at the same time I have had to deal with number of students from different universities comin

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AJWM ( 19027 )
          It doesn't just "track flight paths".

          First, it has to get the data -- which covers everything from radar skin-paints if the aircraft transponder isn't operating, to unpacking the data that that transponder is sending (which could include anything from a simple 4-digit number to altitude, airspeed, heading, etc, etc.). Oh, and it has to raise appropriate alerts if that 4-digit number happens to be one of several special codes (indicating anything from voice-radio outage to a hijacking). There are plenty

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AJWM ( 19027 )

            Over and above all that, there are plenty of other components which relate to Air Traffic Control system, such as various navaids (VORs and such, although they're slowly losing favor to GPS), ATIS and D-ATIS info updates, ACARS messaging, METAR info, etc. Again, these may not be under the control of the current new system, but they should certainly be considered in any design for the future.

          • Sounds like a video game.

            That's not a knock. Publish a buggy game and watch players complain. Then watch your stock plummet. Then watch the sheriff padlock the doors. And that's just a game.

            Software is important.

          • That's not even counting the huge amount of code that's designed to make sure all the other parts of the code are working, and to do something appropriate if they're not, and the code that's designed to make sure that code is also working. That stuff's a lot harder than the basic code, and getting it right is the difference between a system with double- or triple-redundant hardware that gets you the 8 9s of reliability the FAA naively thought was possible with 1980s hardware and a air-traffic control syste

        • Okay, shoot, I feel sort of bad now. I thought twenty years was pretty obvious as a joke. Honestly, I have no idea how long this project took.

          I've worked on a five year project that easily topped half a million lines of code, maybe more, with well over a hundred developers working on it. And oddly enough, it actually was a videogame (as mentioned later in this thread) - an MMO, which actually shares some characteristics with such a system, I suppose. No one died if the game crashed or calculated somethi

  • According to researchers with MITRE and other experts, this hybrid system is the FAA’s first challenge as a system made up of both IP-connected and point-to-point subsystems increases the potential for the point-to-point systems to be compromised because of the increased connectivity to the system as a whole provided by the IP-connected systems, the GAO stated.

    “The older systems are difficult to access remotely because few of them connect from FAA to external entities such as through the Internet. They also have limited lines of direct connection within FAA. Conversely, the new information systems for NextGen programs are designed to interoperate with other systems and use IP networking to communicate within FAA. According to experts, if one system connected to an IP network is compromised, damage can potentially spread to other systems on the network, continually expanding the parts of the system at risk,” the GAO stated.

  • I could go all day on this... (Score:4, Informative)

    by koan ( 80826 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @10:39PM (#49590975)

    It was a shortage of computer memory in the $2.4 billion air traffic control system while a U-2 spy plane flew over southwestern US that caused LAX computers to crash and hundreds of flights to be delayed on April 30. “In theory, the same vulnerability could have been used by an attacker in a deliberate shut-down,” security experts told Reuters. Now that the “very basic limitation of the system” is known, experts expressed concerns about aviation cyberattacks.
    $2 billion air traffic control system failure blamed on shortage of computer memory

    Lockheed Martin, which created the En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) air traffic control system, claims it conducts "robust testing" on all its systems, yet the lack of altitude information in the U-2’s flight plan caused the automated system to cycle off and on trying to fix the error.

    http://www.computerworld.com/a... [computerworld.com]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by stox ( 131684 )

      Due to a bug in the code, the data size became an order of magnitude larger than usual. This was a bug that sufficient memory would have obscured.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I'm surprised they were using dynamic memory allocation at all. When you want to create a robust, reliable system like this you normally statically allocate all RAM and don't allow the system to process things outside those limits. That way you don't run the risk of bugs like this happening, or memory leaks, or any number of other issues. It's standard practice for high reliability systems.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by w3woody ( 44457 )
      Was it really an out of memory issue, or was it fundamentally because the U-2 was flying higher than 65,535 feet?
  • ERAM is written in Ada.

    • Re:Requirement for very high reliability (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @12:07AM (#49591263)

      Written in Ada can make things better, but written by Lockheed Martin, so it balances itself out.

      • Re:Requirement for very high reliability (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Bob Munck ( 238707 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @01:38AM (#49591509) Homepage
        Lockmart is complicated. My division of Unisys was bought by the Carlyle group, which also bought IBM's Federal Systems division, combined the two, and sold the result to Loral. They stirred in some other fragments of defense contractors and sold the result to Lockheed. I'd left Unisys before they sold us, so was surprised to get a call from Lockheed asking why I wasn't drawing my pension. Those two shards of Unisys and IBM had some very good people in them, something I knew both from working in the Unisys group and overseeing the IBM group when I was at MITRE. I was in the Ada community starting with Strawman in the mid-70s. A fair amount of our language design was intended to overcome the failures of management by both DoD PHBs and contractor PHBs. Ultimately, military use of Ada faltered because of the desire of the defense industry to de-skill the programming task. They wanted to pay C++ coder salaries, not software engineer salaries. Ada survives in places that want to do highly-reliable, life-critical systems, increasingly in Europe rather than here.

  • Run, Don't Walk, From Software (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Art3x ( 973401 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @11:07PM (#49591081)
    I say this as a thirtysomething computer programmer, although I've also always been a minimalist: Given the choice between something that uses software and something that does not, go softbare.

    My car, TV, and entire life are now filled with much more software than ever. Now that they can "do" more, they are also slower, flakier, and more complicated. And as a computer programmer, I know why: even the simplest program is amazingly complex. Every keystroke is a pitfall.

    Two million lines? I think I'll drive --- no, just walk.
    • Yep, you don't want to drive if you're worried about code. There's a good chance your car contains close to 100 million lines of it these days. Wait, you bought an old car to avoid that, you say? GM has been using at least 50,000+ lines of code in all of its vehicles since the very early 80s, according to this IEEE article [ieee.org].

      • And if you go way way back to get a car with no code, you end up with one of these:
        http://themetapicture.com/cras... [themetapicture.com]

        • Jesus. I knew there would be a big difference, but I didn't realize it would be that big.

        • If they had used a Saratoga (or any of it's sisters) it would have continued on in a straight line, leaving plastic parts in it's wake.

          They were banned from demolition derby, because the metal they were made of was only technically sheet metal (should have been called plate).

          Also the BelAir was an empty shell. No motor, no trans. Agenda driven testing.

  • 2 million lines of code?? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    can't they do it in one line of perl?

  • Simple solution. VFR. Why make things more complex? Contractors are getting rich from public money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • This isn't just landing approaches. It's following planes as they fly all over the country.

      What are you suggesting? Thousands of spotters with binoculars and CB radios? So commercial flights are to be restricted to a time slot between 10 AM and 3 PM in the summer only?

      Goodluckwiththat.

    • I'd rather have a radar tracking system tell me where the other planes are than to rely on a fragile human pilot looking out the window.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Radar is so twentieth century. ADS-B broadcasts GPS position, heading and some air data. Every other aircraft in the area is free to recieve and display nearby planes and tracks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AJWM ( 19027 )

      Heck, if IFR (I Follow Roads) is good enough for me, it should be good enough for anyone, right?

      (One thing that struck me about several of the old Soviet Aeroflot planes I saw -- and flew on -- in Russia was the bomber-like downward looking windows in the cockpit. I don't know if that reflected the aircraft's original bomber roots or the fact that sometimes they did follow roads. My flight to Krasnoyarsk was diverted because of fog, for example. What, no autoland?)

  • In case anyone is curious (Score:5, Informative)

    by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @07:39AM (#49592199)

    This is what one the old systems looked like [stanford.edu]

    • Back in the late 80s, when I was working on that decade's failed project to replace the 360/90-based systems, my coworker and I were in DC for a meeting on some phase of the project (or one of the related projects), and we had half a day spare, so we went to the Smithsonian Air&Space Museum to do "research". They didn't have examples of the system we were working on, but they did have some other air traffic control systems (Tracon, I think), and other cool stuff like astronaut ice cream. After that we

  • uses nearly two million lines of computer code .... The system almost doubles the number of flights that can be tracked and displayed to controllers

    Nearly two million lines, and almost double the capacity... If they bumped it up to an even two million I wonder if they could've completely doubled the number of the flights that could be tracked.

    And what if they expanded it to four million lines of code, could they have quadrupled the number of flights that could be tracked?

    And what if they made the code self-replicating? Could they have support an infinite number of flights?

  • Will my baggage have a better probability of following me to my destination in the same time frame.

  • Were all developers of the system required to complete training and pass a knowledge check prior to beginning work?
    Has the application had manual/dynamic penetration testing performed against it?
    Are there any critical/high/medium findings?
    What is the timeline to address pen test findings?
    How is access authenticated?
    Is the application segmented housed in a dedicated DMZ?
    Is there firewalling within the application stack?
    Are Web Application Firewalls used?
    What intrusion detection systems are in place?
    What logs

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