"Newps" wrote in message
news:nmPWa.33207$cF.12149@rwcrnsc53...


Sydney Hoeltzli wrote:

ATC data isn't critical in a long-term sense, but it's time
critical. By the time someone loads the back-up data, the
whole real-time picture has changed and we'll be having close
encounters of the aluminum kind.

Nobody has to load anything. A few times a year the commercial power
hiccups. When that happens you hear those ugly powering down sounds.
Then the backup power comes online, then everything resets and you are
back to where you were. Whole deal might last 10-15 seconds but it
seems like forever if you have a lot of traffic. No data is lost in
this process.


Power failures aren't the only threat to ATC systems. I have been involved
in three total radar failures in my career as an enroute controller. The
shortest one lasted for a minute, the longest for over 30 minutes. During
those times, the flight data strips are the *only* game in town. No strips
and no data means chaos even if you can talk to the airplanes. Mention this
to engineers and contractors like Boeing who are spinning their sale of a
"paperless" ATC system because its the "latest" thing and they will tell you
that the system they will build will fail so rarely that it will *almost*
always be reliable. "Hey man, get with the times. Strips are for
dinosaurs. All of the cool privatized ATC companies have done away with
strips. If it works for their [insert tiny and miniscule total traffic
count] ATC operation, we can make it work for America. Just show us the
money and we'll get started on that contract right away!"

I have never understood why we are trying to move everything these days to a
"paperless" environment. Why? That may work at Walmart, or in the cockpit
of a well-equipped airplane (I bet they still carry charts...) but it is a
*bad* idea for enroute ATC no matter how "cutting edge" the technology gets.


Chip, ZTL