Man puts reliance in machine. Machine does everything man used to do. Machine bites man on the butt.
Or something.
It does sound like fodder for a fiction writer. In fact, novelists have picked up on the theme ever since, well, since there has been progress. Classics such as Fail-Safe and The Andromeda Strain, all the way down to the cheesiest sci-fi, went there.
As I write this, no one's real sure what happened to the Federal Aviation Administration communications system near Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport Tuesday, resulted in hundreds of flight delays.
Interestingly, once the first bulletins came out, the incident had very little news play. The story peaked for about 15 seconds, then got buried by other stories such as the Democratic National Convention, the Russkies, and Michael Phelps.
But in case you blinked, here's what happened:
According to CNN, flights at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport were delayed Tuesday afternoon. The airport was having problems processing data, requiring that all flight-plan information be processed through a facility in Salt Lake City, Utah -- overloading that facility.
The two facilities process all flight plans for commercial and general aviation flights in the United States, said FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen. So the delays were not restricted to Atlanta -- Chicago's Midway and O'Hare airports were reporting delays of up to 90 minutes.
But this was one of those coulda-been-worse scenarios. The FAA said there were no radar outages and said they had not lost contact with any planes. The roughly 5,000 flights that were in the air when the breakdown happened were not affected -- just those that were waiting to take off.
This all really isn't as bad as it could have been. Maddening though delays are at the airport (I speak from experience here, sitting through a 10-hour delay at O'Hare in Chicago due to weather), this is one of those things that, well, the imagination can run rampant over the results.
But the story itself went from news to snooze very quickly.
Things got kind of interesting when I picked up the news bulletin (which was texted to me by a local radio station). This was during a slow period at work, and some of us were tossing around possible scenarios.
Elaine, the office manager, suggested it was something terrorists would do -- anything that would upset the system, throw people into a tizzy. But Allen, who works the access gate with me, had his own immediate take:
"Hackers got 'em," he said immediately. Allen's pretty knowledgable about computers and has a slightly off-kilter outlook on life. (He also needs educating on what a hacker does. Those kids that break into computer systems for fun & havoc are crackers. Hackers play with code to improve a system, build a better mousetrap.)
It was interesting what was going through their minds. However, my own scenario was less malevolent forces and more idiocy. Systems break down, I argued. When they're sensitive systems they must be constantly monitored, and they still break down. The more convoluted the system, the greater the potential for a mass failure -- and the harder it is to diagnose and fix the problem.
Especially when man relies on the technology to do the work that used to be done by humans.
I've gone into convenience stores and could not buy something because, well, the computer is down. The place is out of business. Same thing with computerized cash registers at fast food joints.
Back in my taxi driving days, my company used what was called a computer-aided dispatch system. Computer-aided, my butt. A few times the computer crashed and we were out of business until the tech guy could bring us back up.
What really hurt was that no one in the office remembered how they dispatched calls without the computer. If we had, there may have been a fighting chance to keep up with things. (Another cab company I worked for had no computers, so calls were written on a legal pad and dispatched. We even had some quick-and-dirty protocols that would allow us to run in a power failure, but we never had to go that route.)
Where I work now, we check in trucks and containers using a mainframe, handheld computers, and a company-wide database system. A few weeks ago, the whole thing went down for about a half hour. We gate clerks continued to work, writing the info down by hand. A little slower, but we were able to pull it off. And this company is probably the least forward-looking operation I've ever worked for. Company attitudes are locked in the dark ages -- blame an employee rather than look for a glitch in the system -- but we still were able to do our jobs when the computers went toes up.
In Atlanta, the FAA was going back to the old days a bit, working by hand, releasing flights one at a time. Slower, but at least something was getting done.
Or something.
It does sound like fodder for a fiction writer. In fact, novelists have picked up on the theme ever since, well, since there has been progress. Classics such as Fail-Safe and The Andromeda Strain, all the way down to the cheesiest sci-fi, went there.
As I write this, no one's real sure what happened to the Federal Aviation Administration communications system near Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport Tuesday, resulted in hundreds of flight delays.
Interestingly, once the first bulletins came out, the incident had very little news play. The story peaked for about 15 seconds, then got buried by other stories such as the Democratic National Convention, the Russkies, and Michael Phelps.
But in case you blinked, here's what happened:
According to CNN, flights at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport were delayed Tuesday afternoon. The airport was having problems processing data, requiring that all flight-plan information be processed through a facility in Salt Lake City, Utah -- overloading that facility.
The two facilities process all flight plans for commercial and general aviation flights in the United States, said FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen. So the delays were not restricted to Atlanta -- Chicago's Midway and O'Hare airports were reporting delays of up to 90 minutes.
But this was one of those coulda-been-worse scenarios. The FAA said there were no radar outages and said they had not lost contact with any planes. The roughly 5,000 flights that were in the air when the breakdown happened were not affected -- just those that were waiting to take off.
This all really isn't as bad as it could have been. Maddening though delays are at the airport (I speak from experience here, sitting through a 10-hour delay at O'Hare in Chicago due to weather), this is one of those things that, well, the imagination can run rampant over the results.
But the story itself went from news to snooze very quickly.
Things got kind of interesting when I picked up the news bulletin (which was texted to me by a local radio station). This was during a slow period at work, and some of us were tossing around possible scenarios.
Elaine, the office manager, suggested it was something terrorists would do -- anything that would upset the system, throw people into a tizzy. But Allen, who works the access gate with me, had his own immediate take:
"Hackers got 'em," he said immediately. Allen's pretty knowledgable about computers and has a slightly off-kilter outlook on life. (He also needs educating on what a hacker does. Those kids that break into computer systems for fun & havoc are crackers. Hackers play with code to improve a system, build a better mousetrap.)
It was interesting what was going through their minds. However, my own scenario was less malevolent forces and more idiocy. Systems break down, I argued. When they're sensitive systems they must be constantly monitored, and they still break down. The more convoluted the system, the greater the potential for a mass failure -- and the harder it is to diagnose and fix the problem.
Especially when man relies on the technology to do the work that used to be done by humans.
I've gone into convenience stores and could not buy something because, well, the computer is down. The place is out of business. Same thing with computerized cash registers at fast food joints.
Back in my taxi driving days, my company used what was called a computer-aided dispatch system. Computer-aided, my butt. A few times the computer crashed and we were out of business until the tech guy could bring us back up.
What really hurt was that no one in the office remembered how they dispatched calls without the computer. If we had, there may have been a fighting chance to keep up with things. (Another cab company I worked for had no computers, so calls were written on a legal pad and dispatched. We even had some quick-and-dirty protocols that would allow us to run in a power failure, but we never had to go that route.)
Where I work now, we check in trucks and containers using a mainframe, handheld computers, and a company-wide database system. A few weeks ago, the whole thing went down for about a half hour. We gate clerks continued to work, writing the info down by hand. A little slower, but we were able to pull it off. And this company is probably the least forward-looking operation I've ever worked for. Company attitudes are locked in the dark ages -- blame an employee rather than look for a glitch in the system -- but we still were able to do our jobs when the computers went toes up.
In Atlanta, the FAA was going back to the old days a bit, working by hand, releasing flights one at a time. Slower, but at least something was getting done.
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