I see some of the Twitter/X/GBNews frothers are blaming the French for the ATC failure...
...despite the same information being received by a number of ATC systems and processed without a major failure. Which would suggest that it's not the data that's the issue.
Aye. I saw the "Crashed by dodgy French data" headlines and my first thought was, "Poor or non-existent validation of incoming data coupled with poor or non-existent exception handling when faced with utter crap." The second was, "What a piss-poor excuse for failure *that* was."
Anyone else remember the steady stream of not at all flattering stories that appeared in CW when NATS was being commissioned and the ATC software was being written / tested *mumble* decades ago?
If, as NATS are claiming, it was a ‘corrupted’ flight plan that caused a long term national outage, then I’d be questioning the professionalism of each and every team leader from the requirements capture team, through the designers, the coders the testers and the operational acceptance team. In this day and age there is no acceptable reason that a single poor data set could crash a system. Buffer overflow errors are high school level stuff.
From what I’ve read/heard it was the input database that crashed, and they had a 4 hour buffer of live flights data. When they had failed to get the input database back online within that 4 hour window (that’s never going to happen Matt, 4 hours is ages enough to bring the database back on line) they had to revert to the manual system, that thankfully enough of the controllers could use. However, that’s when the backlogs started.
But someone will have got their bonus on the back of saving all that money on implementing a proper backup system, and they have surely been promoted or retired by now.
