What happened with air traffic control yesterday?
The "Ground Stop" was issued at 3:55 EST and lifted at 8:15.
The general reason was listed, "extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety."
More specifically, the reason was described as a telecommunications outage.
The "Ground Stop" was issued at 3:55 EST and lifted at 8:15.
The general reason was listed, "extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety."
More specifically, the reason was described as a telecommunications outage.
On Tuesday, Nov. 10, a new company, Air Space Intelligence turned on its AI driven "SMART" system for air traffic control. This system has no direct control to anything, but offers suggestions to the air traffic controllers. Those suggestions are based on input from a myriad of data streams, like weather, schedules, staffing, and traffic flow.
This company received it's contract in June, and went into production in November, just 5 months later.
Oh My God...
Disclaimer: I will say I have zero first hand knowledge on this problem. But I have been a troubleshooter for networked systems for over 5 decades. My latest project was creating a simple system that picked up files from a number of user defined folder locations, and sending them to a 3rd party API. This automated a process that previously had lawyers do a basically a drag and drop.
It was a rush job, and it took 6 months. 6 weeks for the actual coding, and the rest of the time was studying the networks, intermediate servers, construction of the databases, backup and email servers, purchasing and design of the Production, Test and QA environments. Assignment of the business personal in their tasks, designing the use-cases and the test scenarios. This was built into what would best be described as a HUGE network.
Would the system be on premises, or in the cloud? Linux or Windows? SQLServer or DB2.
The actual coding took 6 weeks. The actual task of moving the files from point A to B was about 6 lines of code. Everything else was establishing the framework and logging of the event.
Now we have some AI Startup company push their product into our outdated air traffic control system in 5 months? Can we say FAFO? I can just see the paint peeling in the reflection pool. Did they set up a test system that was an analog of the FAA traffic control system to test their product first? Using TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) circuitry? I do not think so. I think they built a box that made replies using some Linux computer.
The parts reported that failed were control circuits in the communications, and not the AI itself. So Air Space Intelligence is currently saying it was not their fault. Of course, it's less than 24 hours into the forensics, and we don't know.
What I can say, is that AI systems are very chatty. That AI summary you now see when you run a google search for something like "what happened yesterday?" That spawned thousands of threads (think micro programs) in a datacenter somewhere, which then reached out a myriad of servers, possibly world wide. And gave you a summary of it's best guess of what you want.
It was a rush job, and it took 6 months. 6 weeks for the actual coding, and the rest of the time was studying the networks, intermediate servers, construction of the databases, backup and email servers, purchasing and design of the Production, Test and QA environments. Assignment of the business personal in their tasks, designing the use-cases and the test scenarios. This was built into what would best be described as a HUGE network.
Would the system be on premises, or in the cloud? Linux or Windows? SQLServer or DB2.
The actual coding took 6 weeks. The actual task of moving the files from point A to B was about 6 lines of code. Everything else was establishing the framework and logging of the event.
Now we have some AI Startup company push their product into our outdated air traffic control system in 5 months? Can we say FAFO? I can just see the paint peeling in the reflection pool. Did they set up a test system that was an analog of the FAA traffic control system to test their product first? Using TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) circuitry? I do not think so. I think they built a box that made replies using some Linux computer.
The parts reported that failed were control circuits in the communications, and not the AI itself. So Air Space Intelligence is currently saying it was not their fault. Of course, it's less than 24 hours into the forensics, and we don't know.
What I can say, is that AI systems are very chatty. That AI summary you now see when you run a google search for something like "what happened yesterday?" That spawned thousands of threads (think micro programs) in a datacenter somewhere, which then reached out a myriad of servers, possibly world wide. And gave you a summary of it's best guess of what you want.
The best analogy I can think of is when the telegraph was invented. Messages could flash across the country in a few minutes. But then that message had to get to the home of the recipient, that required a messenger boy to run that last few miles. Taking an hour or so.
Which is still good. But now lets say the office is getting 15 messages an hour, and you have only 5 boys to deliver.
Problem.
Problem.
Their system was installed on Tuesday. And for what we currently know, nothing untoward happened. So what happened? Friday. Tuesday is the lightest air traffic. Wednesday is only slightly heavier. I would be willing to bet that on Thursday, warning lights were going off. Fingers were being crossed. Then Friday. Second heaviest traffic of the week and real problems were being noted, leading to a shutdown of the whole country at 4pm.
So what really happened? My question is why did they allow traffic to resume 4 hours later. What did they do?
Time will tell.
