Non-motoring > Airspace shut down	Miscellaneous
Thread Author: sooty123	Replies: 30

New Fri 12 Dec 14 15:36   Airspace shut down - sooty123

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30454240 closed over london for a few hours. Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 17:33   Airspace shut down - spamcan61

I suppose it's a sign of the times that I first assumed it was a terrorist threat. Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 17:46   Airspace shut down - Old Navy

I usually assume finger trouble, either the computer geeks screwed up or someone pulled the wrong plug. Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 17:49   Airspace shut down - Runfer D'Hills

>> www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30454240 Can you hear the flights Ben Ando? Reply to this message | Report message       1

New Fri 12 Dec 14 17:56   Airspace shut down - Old Navy

I had to look up Ben Ando. I don't do BBC news, its loony left propaganda. Last edited by: Old Navy on Fri 12 Dec 14 at 17:57 Reply to this message | Report message       1

New Fri 12 Dec 14 17:57   Airspace shut down - Runfer D'Hills

Aha Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 18:04   Airspace shut down - WillDeBeest

On Ben Ando's personal website, he says 'And yes, I can hear the drums.' It was my only reason for looking there, and finding it made my day. Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 18:06   Airspace shut down - Fullchat

All linked to Pat's laptop woes me thinks :) Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 18:16   Airspace shut down - Pat

Nothing to do with me!! Pat Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 18:06   Airspace shut down - Old Navy

I don't think we can hear them, or him this far North. :) Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 18:39   Airspace shut down - Runfer D'Hills

I'd seen that a while back WDB, hence the tenuous reference. Can't see his name now without hearing that song in my head. Bit like Huw Edwards' upper lip which as someone or other pointed out looks like someone is tugging from above with a fishing line when he speaks. Check it out. Last edited by: Runfer D'Hills on Fri 12 Dec 14 at 18:41 Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 18:10   Airspace shut down - Manatee

>> Aha >> Abba, Shirley? Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 20:27   Airspace shut down - Fursty Ferret

Maastricht ATC: "ABC123, would you like to divert to Amsterdam or Brussels?" Us: "Err, we'd prefer to go to London actually..." ATC: "Haven't you heard the news?" Us: "What news?" ATC: "London isn't accepting any flights into their airspace. How long can you hold over Belgium for?" Been a LOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG day. Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 20:45   Airspace shut down - Manatee

The meeja are always reliable on aviation matters. "hundreds" of planes "hovering" over Heathrow :o www.pprune.org/rumours-news/552783-all-london-airspace-closed-2.html#post8780210 And politicians of course. Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said disruption on this scale is "simply unacceptable". Er, no - unacceptable would be if a system glitch caused planes to crash and people died. Reply to this message | Report message

New Fri 12 Dec 14 20:52   Airspace shut down - Manatee

Sorry, the post I linked to above has been removed, as often happens on that site! Reply to this message | Report message

New Sat 13 Dec 14 23:00   Airspace shut down - Manatee

Probably the nearest we will see to a RCA: goo.gl/cuZuAU (The Register) Last edited by: Manatee on Sat 13 Dec 14 at 23:01 Reply to this message | Report message

New Sun 14 Dec 14 08:45   Airspace shut down - Zero

>> Probably the nearest we will see to a RCA: >> >> goo.gl/cuZuAU >> >> (The Register) There will be a proper RCA published, thats not it. I used to work on that mainframe. Reply to this message | Report message

New Sun 14 Dec 14 10:37   Airspace shut down - swiss tony

>> I used to work on that mainframe. >> Got bored and decided to use the backdoor? Reply to this message | Report message

New Sun 14 Dec 14 11:20   Airspace shut down - wokingham

One line of corrupt code in a system update? Worse than IOS! Reply to this message | Report message

New Sun 14 Dec 14 11:39   Airspace shut down - wokingham

Or is it better? Reply to this message | Report message

New Sun 14 Dec 14 12:16   Airspace shut down - Zero

Old Iron mainframes are deeply misunderstood and rapidly getting a bad press. Through no fault of their own and without good reason. They are still current technology- or can be made to be so, but they are not and are unfashionable. For years they have sat there doing their stuff reliably 24x7 365 days a year. Because they never went wrong the army of people that kept it that way was deemed unnecessary and expensive - the skills diluted or even removed entirely. Investment in their operation and updating removed. To the point where no-one understand what the hell they do, how important they are or how to fix them. Suddenly it goes wrong - surprise surprise - recovery is unknown territory. Reply to this message | Report message

New Sun 14 Dec 14 18:58   Airspace shut down - rtj70

IBM has maintained compatibility between mainframe generations. I have not looked into this but assume the application is running on modern systems. If that is the case and it works and there's sufficient performance, why not? Why reinvent the wheel? The biggest issue might be the language used to program it. There are still uses for FORTRAN and COBOL. It's not all Java, C#, etc. Last edited by: rtj70 on Sun 14 Dec 14 at 18:58 Reply to this message | Report message

New Tue 16 Dec 14 07:59   Airspace shut down - car4play

Ah, yes FORTRAN, the language of my programming milk teeth. Reply to this message | Report message

New Tue 16 Dec 14 09:48   Airspace shut down - Fursty Ferret

It's written in JOVIAL, I believe, similar to ALGOL. Reply to this message | Report message

New Tue 16 Dec 14 10:01   Airspace shut down - rtj70

You are correct in saying it's written in a language that is not widely known. Therefore they have to train anyone expected to support it. Now you'd think they would have to pay decent wages to keep staff on to maintain this and should move to a platform using a more widely used and modern computer programming language. Of course if it's similar to ALGOL some might think there'd be more developers you could call on. But how popular is ALGOL these days? Last edited by: rtj70 on Tue 16 Dec 14 at 10:04 Reply to this message | Report message

New Tue 16 Dec 14 10:05   Airspace shut down - Fursty Ferret

>> You are correct in saying it's written in a language that is not widely known. >> Therefore they have to train anyone expected to support it. Now you'd think they would >> have to pay decent wages to keep staff on to maintain this and should move >> to a platform using a more widely used and modern computer programming language. >> Have to say I disagree. The original implementation is tried and tested and more importantly, mathematically proven to do what it's supposed to do given the correct input. It's a foul and miserable task which I loathed doing at uni, and I imagine the cost of rebuilding it from scratch in C++ or similar will be far more excessive than keeping on a couple of experienced developers to troubleshoot problems (even if they can command ££££££££.) Reply to this message | Report message

New Tue 16 Dec 14 10:09   Airspace shut down - rtj70

I didn't say it was the wrong language to use. How many realtime oriented languages have there been for such systems? I'm saying there aren't many developers with the language skills. Even if it's similar to ALGOL, not many will leave university degrees with ALGOL programming skills. I think the problem they have is that they haven't retained the developers because it just worked. And then some changes were needed and it went wrong. Probably because they didn't test the changes properly. Reply to this message | Report message

New Tue 16 Dec 14 10:48   Airspace shut down - henry k

I suspect there is lots of very ancient software still in use in the airline and other major companies Software and applications written before the IBM 360 ( mid 1960s ) was still in use around the world in 2000 and I suspect is still in use. Manpower must still be available and to maintain them. It is obviously very very expensive and significant risk to just swop over to a new system. Obviously the press and MPs like the story but life is not that simple. I have been in the situation where a computer bug has existed for years before it was finally tracked down and corrected. I have also spent many days trying to find out why a critical computer program was suddenly producing lists of error reports. I eventually solved it. The big mainframe CPU had developed a fault, The last thing I expected. Again life is not simple. Typo correction Last edited by: henry k on Tue 16 Dec 14 at 10:49 Reply to this message | Report message

New Tue 16 Dec 14 11:10   Airspace shut down - Bromptonaut

We were still using a case recording system dating from the seventies well into the 21st century. IIRC it was written in COBOL. It did the job, we owned the code and had people who could maintain it and do such limited upgrades as were necessary. Various attempts to replace it with proprietary stuff, usually solicitors office packages, had come to nowt on grounds of expense/suitability. Previous bad experiences with software support after customising such systems meant there was a veto on that as a solution. When I first encountered it the users interrogated via dumb terminals but input was 'specialist'; we completed forms and data inputters transferred info onto system. Later it ran on our PCs but still blocky green text on a black ground. Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Tue 16 Dec 14 at 11:12 Reply to this message | Report message

New Tue 16 Dec 14 11:40   Airspace shut down - Manatee

Bill Gates (among others) has posited that the opposite of Moore's Law for hardware applies to software. Hence why your PC still needs noticeable thinking time for apparently simple tasks despite having maybe 1000 times the actual processing power that a large mainframe might have had 30 years ago. Underlying the fact that software maybe halves in speed every two years, squandering the benefits of hardware advances, must be an exponential increase in complexity and the number of possible error-prone operations. Reply to this message | Report message

New Tue 16 Dec 14 11:50   Airspace shut down - commerdriver

Maintenance and technical refresh of complex 100% availability systems is a very expensive and complex business and most organisations with such systems do not handle that well at all. It requires the correct people to be retained and knowledge to be properly documented. Conversely, for many such systems, the actual job the system has to do does not vary greatly over many years. In addition, the probability of a replacement system being introduced on more recent technology and more up to date development methods/languages etc without a loss of availability at least in the early stages is not high. Hence, for most such organisations upgrades are very rare unless the capacity is reaching some kind of limit. Reply to this message | Report message