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NATS computer failure closing London airports

an Avro RJ85 from AMS to London City, has been circling above Kent at 4.500 feet for the past 20 minutes or so and has now departed back towards Amsterdam therefore the issue is not only with airspace but also having an impact at LCY – Heathrow, Luton, Stansted and Gatwick are all recovering aircraft and allowing limited starts

I was watching that one as well. There was a similar one which disappeared after I looked away for some minutes and I think must have diverted to Southend.

Last Edited by PiperArcher at 12 Dec 18:54

I wonder if anyone has tried turning it off and back on again? ;)

Seriously though, didn’t something very similar happen recently (as in last 18 months)?

EIWT Weston, Ireland

Someone probably left the Windows Update setting on “let windows download and install updates automatically” lol. But in all major critical computer systems (and there isn’t much more critical than ATC) they really should be highly redundant with immediate failover and near 100% capacity capability.

Last Edited by PiperArcher at 12 Dec 22:48

A computer failure that led to southern England being closed to air traffic on Friday could be repeated because software used to control flights dates from the 1960s, it has emerged.

The above from The Telegraph, full story here

I really don’t see what the problem should be with using software from the 1960’s? Obviously if the software can’t handle the load then there is a problem, but that is unrelated to its age.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

One joke among programmers is that software does gradually degrade

From the article:

… said the NAS system was written using a now defunct computer language called Jovial, meaning Nats has to train programmers in Jovial just to maintain the antiquated software.

More to the point, what hardware are they running this on? They must have a Jovial compiler but presumably nobody would have ported the compiler to any new hardware made in recent decades. And it will pre-date C so the compiler won’t have been written in C itself. It was most likely written in assembler, which is fine (I’ve done vast amounts of that) but it’s not really portable to a new processor. Maybe the software was written for the IBM System/360 (1964-1978) and is running under an emulator, which does exist.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

none like the Brits for keeping up antiques, indeed.

I really don’t see what the problem should be with using software from the 1960’s?

As very correctly pointed out: software from that era was bound to its dedicated hardware. As the hardware becomes obsolete, the software gets orphaned. Emulation can work, up to a certain level, but there is no perfect lookalike. Not in love and not in cars and not in IT.

Last Edited by at 13 Dec 18:43
EBZH Kiewit, Belgium

IBM System/390 does exactly that: run century old software with 110% backwards compatibility on modern hardware. Every time they discuss a modern replacement for the “proven” software, they probably always arrive at the Heathrow Terminal 5 project and therefore postpone it.

To a real software pro, it really doesn’t matter which programming language or environment something is written in. No programming language or hardware platform you couldn’t master in a few days.

Yeah, but we live in an era of the “Univ of Upper Warlingham MBA in Risk Management” and you Achim are one of the declining number of people in this world who actually know what they are doing.

Of course, I do as well – so along as it can be coded in assembler, Z80, 80×86, H8/300, etc

These days, after ~30 years of the only possible salary progression meaning moving from a programmer (i.e. doing real work) to a “manager” (or, of course, leaving and starting your own business, but that’s quite a big step for most), an organisation like NATS will be trying absolutely desperately hard to recruit a receptionist who can even spell the name of the company. Just chucking out the applicants who have tatoos and enough titanium hanging off their nostrils to need the W&B recalculated, will remove most of the applicants in the Swanwick area.

but there is no perfect lookalike. Not in love and not in cars and not in IT.

In general, a lookalike is really not the main requirement in the first two

This article has more info. It is indeed a System/390 running an emulator.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

One joke among programmers is that software does gradually degrade

I know about “bit rot” of course. My comment was more directed to the media who automatically assume that old=bad.

BTW, I actually count myself among people who know what they are doing. My first house had a dodgy 68HC11-based central temperature controller for the electric radiators working on feedback from room temperature sensors. It was very unstable and was prone to ±2°C oscillation around the set temperature value, with a 30 hr period! (The people who designed the box obviously didn’t know what they were doing.)

I downloaded the program from the controller chip, wrote a disassembler in Prolog, rewrote the resulting assembly source code, wrote an assembler in Prolog and re-programmed the chip with the binary. I also built some amplifiers to improve the sensitivity of the room temperature sensors. Originally, they were connected directly to the ADC of the 68HC11 which only allowed a resolution of 1°C. Not nearly enough… Anyway it all worked beautifully.

For some reason I don’t find the time to such things anymore. It might possibly have some connection to the time I spend on EuroGA. :-) Of course, we didn’t have internet at home those days and had just got it at work (and that was at an IT research institute).

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden
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