Aren't You Happy You Voted For Baby Bush? (ATC Privatization)

David Megginson writes:

This doesn't make syntactic sense as it stands, until you correct the
first "that" to "than":

Hopefully, they have a bit of redundancy built into their system.
There are a lot more critical things that ATC than don't keep paper
copies any more, if you want anything to worry about tonight.

One more try -- this one seems to be jinxed:

Hopefully, they have a bit of redundancy built into their system.
There are a lot more critical things than ATC that don't keep paper
copies any more, if you want anything to worry about tonight.


All the best,


David

--
David Megginson, , http://www.megginson.com/

"David Megginson" wrote in message
...

OK, I understand what happened -- sorry. There was a one-letter typo
in the original message that might have confused this thread. I wrote

Hopefully, they have a bit of redundancy built into their system.
There are a lot more critical things that ATC that don't keep paper
copies any more, if you want anything to worry about tonight.

This doesn't make syntactic sense as it stands, until you correct the
first "that" to "than":

Hopefully, they have a bit of redundancy built into their system.
There are a lot more critical things that ATC than don't keep paper
copies any more, if you want anything to worry about tonight.


It still doesn't make sense. Did you mean, "There are a lot more critical
things than ATC that don't keep paper copies any more, if you want anything
to worry about tonight"?

Steven P. McNicoll wrote:
It still doesn't make sense. Did you mean, "There are a lot more critical
things than ATC that don't keep paper copies any more, if you want anything
to worry about tonight"?

I think that's what he meant.

I'm not sure I'd agree though.

There are several different types of criticality. Most gov't
records are critical, but in a long-term sense. If the computer
they're stored on glitches, there's generally time to order
a new hard drive, install it, and restore the data from back up
storage. Come back in 3 days.

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.

Cheers,
Sydney

"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

Newps wrote:

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.

Newps,

I work at a major medical center. We have emergency power, backed
by redundant generators. It's set up so that if it works as it should,
there aren't any "ugly powering-down sounds", it just comes on. If
the backup generator fails to report to work, there may be a little
glitch before the backup-backup comes online.

Nevertheless, there have been situations where it did not work as
it should, and we have heard ugly powering-down sounds (the truly
essential stuff, like respirators and incubators, have a short-term
battery backup).

I understand what you're saying about how the system is supposed to
work.

My point is that sometimes, for reasonably forseeable circumstances,
the system doesn't work as it's supposed to.

Best,
Sydney

"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.

Damn, we run our 24/7 order entry system from conditioned power/battery
packs which means if the power burps, or even goes down for several minutes,
no one in the computer room would even know. I'd say ordering products is
less critical than ATC's services.

"Sydney Hoeltzli" wrote in message
...

I work at a major medical center. We have emergency power, backed
by redundant generators. It's set up so that if it works as it should,
there aren't any "ugly powering-down sounds", it just comes on. If
the backup generator fails to report to work, there may be a little
glitch before the backup-backup comes online.

You should be running from conditioned power/batteries ALL THE TIME and the
backup generators should then keep the CPS charged until the regular juice
starts flowing.

Nevertheless, there have been situations where it did not work as
it should, and we have heard ugly powering-down sounds (the truly
essential stuff, like respirators and incubators, have a short-term
battery backup).

A few years ago, most of the west had a blackout that lasted several hours.
It's amazing how many critical (at leazst business critical) sites have only
battery backup to allow for graceful shutdown.

Newps wrote:

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.

Do it the way the phone company does. Everything runs off of battery. If
the commercial power feed fails and the diesels have to kick in, there's
no discontinuity of service.

Now, every once in a while a substation goes down and nobody notices
(happens once in about 50 years or so). In that case, somebody loses
service after about two days. Think ATC would notice a problem by then?

There is one practical difference. The phone company is running off of
48 volt DC, and ATC is using standard AC (I presume). Still shouldn't be
a problem for a decent engineer.

George Patterson
The optimist feels that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The
pessimist is afraid that he's correct.
James Branch Cavel

G.R. Patterson III wrote:


Newps wrote:

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.


Do it the way the phone company does. Everything runs off of battery. If
the commercial power feed fails and the diesels have to kick in, there's
no discontinuity of service.

We would do that if it were needed.


Now, every once in a while a substation goes down and nobody notices
(happens once in about 50 years or so). In that case, somebody loses
service after about two days. Think ATC would notice a problem by then?

The generators already come online on automatically, we have one for the
tower itself and one for the radar.

In article , "Chip Jones"
wrote:

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.

That's exactly the user pushback we got around 1995 when considering
electronic strips for STARS. Most of the controllers we dealted with
wanted nothing to do with them.

--
Bob Noel