The FAA? No redundancy at all.
Such breakdowns often can be prevented with sufficient redundancy, or enough different computers and communication channels to handle the same workload in an emergency.
Redundancy is so critical for power and water utilities that they can be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars a day if they're found insufficiently prepared — and $1 million per day if they're found to be willfully negligent.
"In the industries I work in, if you have something that critical, you generally build more redundancy," said Jason Larsen, a security researcher with consultancy IOActive Inc. who previously spent five years at Idaho National Laboratory examining electrical plants' control systems. "If this (FAA outage) happened at a power plant, I'd be telling them to open up their checkbook and expect to be fined."
FAA spokeswoman Tammy Jones stressed that these types of problems "don't happen on a mass scale or a regular basis," and noted that the FAA handles 50,000 to 60,000 fights a day. And flying on U.S. airlines has never been safer.
"The system is working," she said. "We are making sure people are getting from one place to another."
There are two primary computer systems handling flight plan data processing. One is located in Atlanta. The second is in Salt Lake City. The Atlanta computers have failed twice in the past two years, causing disruptions and delays across the nation.
Yet, the FAA has done nothing to rectify the problem. That means spending the money to build in redundancy into the system. It would be a no-brainer in any other industry, but since this is a government agency, the usual rules don't apply.
And the FAA blows off suggestions that there is insufficient redundancy by noting the infrequent delays due to the computer failures. Right. No company would be able to make those claims. The FAA should be held accountable for the problems, and corrective action taken.
No comments:
Post a Comment