FAA grounds all US departures after NOTAM goes down The US Federal Aviation Administration ordered airlines to "pause all domestic departures" this morning as it tries to deal with an outage in a critical computer system. The agency said in a tweet that its Notice to Air Mission Systems (NOTAM) system was offline, affecting operations throughout US airspace. The FAA is …
And were known as Notice To Air Men for 70years until somebody noticed it was sexist.
There was then a long and involved process to come up with a new pronoun freindly version that wouldn't involve changing lots of software and paper forms
Plus "Air Missions" makes you think of Top Gun while flying a 5am commuter flight to Minneapolis
After the slightly silly renaming of fishermen to fishers (they were always trawlermen in Yorkshire so are now presumably trawlers)
They could rename anyone who flies a plane as "airs" or perhaps "airers". Or since there are no longer any flight engineers or navigators or radio operators - couldn't it just have been "Notice To Pilots" - again except that it would have involved changing a lot of forms
My wife came up with that "Notice to Pilots" independently over coffee this morning -- except she suggested that they be called "PIlot NOTification" (or PINOT), with coloured suffixes for the gravity of the situation being notified about: you know, PINOT noir for life-and-death type stuff, PINOT blanc for more nice-to-know information, ...
I mulled it over while having my toast.
Cheers everyone!
(I'll get my own coat, thanks. It's the leather bomber with the aviators in the pocket.)
And the entire rename is stupid because I don't see why airmen is sexist to begin with.
Never, ever underestimate the willingness of the professionally offended to take issue with anything which even hints at gender issues.
The RAF recently changed the names of some ranks:
Leading Aircraftsman (LAC), Senior Aircraftsman (SAC) & Junior Technician (JT) became Air Specialist (class 2), Air Specialist (class 1) and Air Specialist (class 1) Technician.
Source https://www.raf.mod.uk/our-organisation/raf-ranks.
Some possible phrases within that "Who, Me?" article
* What version of Micros~ Access was this written for? I need to re-install it
* Windows 10 was updating? AGAIN???
* What do you mean, "no daily backup"?
* 'Please insert disk in drive A: and press OK'
* That is most certainly a BSOD
* 'mailbox full'
* Can anyone find me a working IDE drive?
* CPU fan was clogged
Couple hours of halt versus days of chaos and people sleeping in airports for several days in a row. Not quite the same thing.
The NOTAM system was also nice enough to go down after the holidays were past, and on one of the lightest flying days of the week. And in the early morning, so few if any people will end up stranded overnight for even one night.
I am curious if this was a hardware failure where redundancy failed to kick in or a botched software upgrade. Overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday is exactly the time one would pick for such an upgrade, as it would incur the minimum potential disruption.
They're probably running at least z15s. Program design of 1960s assembler bears a sharp resemblance to current vogue of microservices architecture and is possible to build error free and understandable to future generations - you don't have to endlessly refactor it to understand it. The documentation has not kept pace, but I currently work on java systems that are built with no documentation (not even comments in the code) other than a story.
My first job was a TPF assembly programmer (on IBM 3090J iron). Our (inherited) codebase had stuff dating back to the late 1960s..
And some of it generated self-modifying code. We had an interesting time cleaning *that* up! Some of those early segments were obviously programmed by people obsessed with keeping the code as small as possible, even at the expense of maintainability..
"I'm betting a 2000s era IBM mainframe emulating a 1980s IBM mainframe running an IBM mainframe OS from the 60s with an app written in System360 Assembly"
And if you've ever actually read a NOTAM, you would believe this to be true. They look as though they're intended to be distributed via teletype (as they probably once were?), character-limited to minimize the cost of transmission.
For the curious ...
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/initiatives/notam/what_is_a_notam/Pilots_NOTAM_primer_for_2021.pdf
Example (from the reference):
IAP LOS ANGELES INTL, Los Angeles, CA. RNAV (GPS) Y RWY 24L, AMDT 5... LPV DA 628/ HAT 505 ALL CATS, VISIBILITY ALL CATS RVR 6000. LNAV/VNAV DA 632/ HAT 509 ALL CATS. TEMPORARY CRANE 342 MSL 5513FT EAST OF RWY 24L (2016-AWP-6554-OE
I work in the industry and I can read that. They're kept short and to the point because pilots, at a literal glance, can get all the information they need while actively piloting the vehicle. More interesting are the ones where the airfield has significant snow clearing operations. Cleared width, height of snowbanks, which side of the runway has any windrows, the RWYCC (Runway Condition Code) telling the pilot how slippery the runway is likely to be when braking....it's all in there!
They appear to have an unhealthy cat fixation, though :)
Joking aside, I am actually very happy with the efficiency and, in a way, the "backward" appearance for a simple reason: it works. And it works very well indeed.
What evidently did NOT work was resilience and resilience testing - this system or a clone of it should have been kicked offline to see how well it recovered. On the plus side, again, is that backups have backups there, and people continue to be trained in the manual fallback processes that it takes to get everyone safely on the ground.
Yes, it caused a massive disruption, but note that the airspace closed safely - let's be grateful for that.
The NOTAM system does the same job as a bulletin board. An older bulletin board that relays messages by Telex /(because that's what the messages look like).
It shows just out of touch the FAA is. The obvious answer to not being able to issue a NOTAM isn't to ground all domestic flights but to stop creating the damn things in the first place. Very little would have happened overnight that would affect airline traffic -- the notices are primarily about prohibited areas, exclusions zones around Presidential movements and major spectator events (they're the only things that crop up at short notice that people don't know about from other sources) so delaying whatever would cause the NOTAM for a few hours or even -- SHOCK! --- taking a risk not grounding all traffic with in a 30 mile radius might work just as well.
But if you've got the Power then its a pity not to use it, I suppose.
the notices are primarily about prohibited areas ... That seems like an important thing to pilots, if only to avoid having the FAA yank their licenses for violating said prohibited areas. And there's nothing wrong with printed Telexes, or electronic bulletin-board systems from the 1980s, if they get the job done.
I notice the FAA has a web page where pilots can search for NOTAMs relevant to a specific flight (you enter the origination and destination airports, or a user-defined radius from an airport, etc. [https://pilotweb.nas.faa.gov/PilotWeb/].
Sure, it seems like grounding those flights was a misuse of The Powah, but I wouldn't have bet my life on the chance all NOTAMs my pilot missed (due to system failure) would have been "irrelevant."
So air-persons subscribe to messages about specific routes and destinations?
The messages are short and consist of abbreviations that nobody outside the club understand.
I'm thinking of an entirely stable and reliable commercial platform that provides this sort of capability at scale.
And emoticons on NOTAMs would be fun
You've conveniently forgotten some of the more important categories - temporary restrictions on airfields, for example. Most of that is short-term and known only a few hours to days in advance, yet it can very significantly alter the flight plan for the pilots - a mayday fuel isn't fun at the best of times but getting into one because you didn't know some low-hanging clouds and a precision approach system down for maintennance would prevent you from using the airports you expected to be safe to use is just stupid. Thanks to the NOTAM system providing this kind of info in one place for every bit of airspace around the world, it's also trivially easy to avoid.
This is incorrect. Weather events and runway conditions are also communicated via NOTAM. If I'm flying into Toronto and they had a storm go through an hour before I'm set to land there, a Runway Surface Condition inspection is conducted and a NOTAM is issued that tells the pilots the runway conditions. Icy, snow covered, swept, brushed and sanded etc etc. It's important information for the pilots to have and they CAN'T have that information before they take off. It's not current or accurate.
.... little Bobby Tables is flying off on holiday somewhere!
-----------> Little Bobby is such a little angel!
https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/notam
https://www.databricks.com/session_na20/automating-federal-aviation-administrations-faa-system-wide-information-management-swim-data-ingestion-and-analysis
Its The Cloud.... Its Java Messaging... What could possibly go wrong.
Bring back TSO/E on a good old reliable IBM 370 I say. It worked.
The early rumor was "a corrupted database file".
Made me think it might have been a '.mdb' file, heh heh heh
But as it's gummint, probably an 'Oracle solution', The articles you mention seem to be about a proposed system and/or data analysis, unless I missed something.
(The longer link did mention Oracle once, also Sybase)
(Anon due to being work-related...)
We recently had a major system semi-outage - three-quarters of users' computers couldn't access a particular system which is very critical to day-to-day business. But sometimes, rebooting and trying again would work. Sometimes. Apparently it depended on which domain machine the user's computer connected to at bootup. IT eventually figured out what it was. Not DNS for a change...
It was WINS!
NOTAM was a relatively simple system using Baudot code on RTTY. I wonder what they have done to it to make it crash? I was working on a system in South America intended to get NOTAM's onto the satellite REDDIG system designed to connect all South American airports. I freaked out when an airport NOTAM system crashed so I reverted it back to original configuration. The system designers stepped in and made it work. The loss of service was so short nobodty noticed.
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