ATC Outages Becoming Far Too Common
Air Traffic Control (ATC) systems controlling all aircraft flying around the globe are mission critical operational and air safety systems where outages tend to cause chaos for carriers, airports and the flying public. These outages tend to have huge mega million dollar impacts easily. We have experienced them here in the US and more recently in the UK where there were two within a short time frame. A blip is one thing, extending for long periods of time is beyond merely unacceptable. Systems and their critical component sub-systems whether in house or via an outside provider are all points of potential failure. For starters, the core architecture in ATC systems is for the most part antiquated, but when functioning - does the job. These systems are architected to have critical dependencies upon a various number of subsystems which can be data feed systems such as radar, weather, flight plans etc. In addition, hardware components can and do fail, same for ba...