Posted on 01/11/2023 9:44:48 AM PST by Rummyfan
Flights are grounded all across the USA… but why? Everybody knows the proximate cause, but is there a deeper rot at the FAA and our Department of Transportation?
You bet!
“How could the FAA leave all US domestic flights grounded for the first time since the 9/11 terror attacks?” is the obvious question, after Wednesday’s hot mess at the FAA. Under Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a better question might be, “Yes, but were flights grounded with diversity, equity, and inclusion?”
Because DEI is exactly where Buttigieg’s priorities lie — not with the vital business of keeping our transportation infrastructure operating.
Talk radio host John Cardillo noted this morning that “If you’re surprised that the FAA’s systems went down this morning grounding all domestic flights, you shouldn’t be.”
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
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.”........................
Oh you’d be surprised at how much old tech there is in govt. both federal and state.
Can’t find qualified people to do upgrades and the guys who did keep stuff going are heading out to go fishing and enjoy retirement.
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?
Can’t find qualified people to do upgrades and the guys who did keep stuff going are heading out to go fishing and enjoy retirement.
~~~
We can just hire Pakistani firms to run our whole national infrastructure for us.
It’s been over 5 years since the House IT scandal. Why did nothing ever happen with that. hmmmm
Sorry for the tangent
It just amazes me how powerfully the media can make mountains out of mole-hills, and make mole-hills out of mountains
Or, or the reports could of be online save trees.........
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.
Years ago my company was doing systems(UNIX) support for a Fortune 100 company. They decided to send the support work over to India and ended our contract. I knew it wouldn’t work out but nobody cared. My admins moved on to other gigs. About 10 months later they contacted me and asked if we could take the support back over. We didn’t but I could not resist telling the manager “I told you so”...:)
The plain fact is that a lot of so called “experienced” India support people are not. They have credentials from paper mills and pass themselves off as knowing what they are doing. What winds up happening is that the companies wind up bringing back all those “old” people they let go due to their salary costs to fix all the stuff the dipsticks in India messed up. Companies don’t talk about this because they would have to admit that American IT folks are just plain better in most cases. But that bean counter can show on his powerpoint presentation that he “saved” the company money by getting rid of the people who actually knew what they were doing.
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