[erlang-questions] erlang in Air Traffic Management ?

[Vance Shipley]

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.


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