[erlang-questions] erlang in Air Traffic Management ?

[jm]

Vance Shipley wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 07:54:03AM +0100, Dominic Williams wrote:
> }  
> }  The real problem is that the industry is very conservative,
> }  and there is great informal pressure not to do things any
> }  differently from how they've been done in the past. There is
> }  even a holy principle, whose name I forget, which is in the
> }  standards, and basically means: we guarantee this is as
> }  safe as (i.e. not worse than) previously designed systems.
> 

This is more or less what I expected. I'll have to dig up a copy of EN
50128 sometime and take a quick flip through it.

> The Federal Aviation Authority in the US apparently follows no
> such tenant.  I was apalled at what I uncovered when looking
> into the 2004 air traffic control outage(*).  Apparently the
> "Voice Switching and Control System" linking pilots to controllers
> on the ground was "upgraded"(+) from a control subsystem using
> Tandem Himalaya Non-Stop computers to Microsoft Windows 2000.
> 
> 	-Vance
> 
> (*) http://www.cnn.com/2004/TRAVEL/09/14/lax.stoppage/
> (+) http://nas-architecture.faa.gov/nas/mechanism/mech_data.cfm?mid=2460

Words fail me. I just hope CASA ( http://www.casa.gov.au/ ) aren't doing
anything this stupid.

Jeff.