My personal knowledge of the FAA stems from contact work of twenty years ago. So... it is a dinosaur organization, extremely resistant to change or update of any kind. All representatives must say YES, it only takes one NO to stop anything And the controllers run the whole shop.. I wouldn't be surprised if they're still using 1970s IBM mainframes for their primary processing. Proven technology if nothing else.
probably both
Climate change strikes again
“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”........................
Long story short is that a guy who can’t tell an exit orifice from an entrance orifice should not be in charge of transportation.
I’ve worked for one of those type of government agencies too.
They were using (and paying $$$ rent for) an IBM mainframe to run a database. I could have replaced the entire thing with a PC running Microsoft Access.
The civil service exam for a job there asked question on how to collate dot matrix printouts. (30 year old technology)
They generated boxes of reports every month. One person’s entire job was to generate these reports, take last months reports and shred them, THEN take them to the incinerator and burn them, and replace them with this months reports.
He did this every month.
No one ever read these reports.
Hmmm, are the galactic intruders telling us who’s boss? Remember the Minute Man silo incidents?
As an IT guy, these types of system failures fascinate me, so I rummaged around the FAA website a bit.
In reading the PDFs one thing that struck me was the vagueness of where the NOTAM database actually resides. There are references to the “NOTAM System computer” (singular) or “NS computer” (singular) and that’s it.
The database is probably small by modern standards, so it might actually be a single computer, perhaps periodically backed up to a second one. I wonder if the main computer died and the backup didn’t work, possibly because nobody tested the recovery procedure for a long time.