FAA Grounds All Flights.
For the first time since 9/11, all commercial aircraft were grounded this week. The problem was a software failure; a corrupted database file had failed. It brought back memories of the last time this had occurred. At the time I was the Global Director of Aerospace, Defense and Shipbuilding for the world’s largest pure technology assistance company. I was in Ottawa, Canada, called fondly by its residents “The town that fun forgot.” I was there for the purpose of surreptitiously scoping out a Canadian company for acquisition.
Oh, Canada!
I had spent the prior day in Toronto on the phone with our CFO trying to dissuade him from purchasing Swiss Air’s book of IT business. I failed, and the day before our book of aerospace and aviation business saw its valuation drop by 95%, we wound up spending more. My wife called me from the DC suburbs where she was and told me about planes flying into buildings. I thought it was Piper Cubs; Not so, ineffective middle-aged overweight REMF. It was a terror attack on America.
I tuned to an aviation news program on the internet and learned that the FAA accomplished a miracle that day. All flights in the US were grounded safely, incoming flights were diverted to Mexico in the South, Alaska in the West, and Newfoundland in the East. No one had ever conceived of needing to do such a thing. It’s a real-world version of “Kill them all and let God sort it out.”
My Friend Jane
I waited until the 15th to contact my friend, Jane Garvey, the FAA Director who had pulled off the miracle. She asked me to come to D.C. and talk about systems support to enabling the kind of decisions she’d had to make. On the 16th I was able to get a flight out to Dulles Airport in DC, where my wife and younger daughter met me. A couple of days later I met with her and her IT Director and told them I wasn’t a techno-expert, but I had learned a few things. First, the purpose of technology support to Executive Decision-Making was to calculate cost/benefit and impacts as close to instantly as possible. Second, when computers make decisions they run through many tables of information that catalogues processes, policies, prior decisions, priorities and perhaps a million other things. It might be counterintuitive, but the worst way to shorten the decision-making process is to skip some of the tables. At the outset we don’t know what is important and what isn’t. The key to good decision-making is a global view of information.
For example, there are billions of ways to shorten the decision-making process by skipping unimportant information, and every one of them is wrong. When making decisions, a computer encounters a slows down when it hits a Josephson Junction limitation. There is no way around it. Actually, there is a way around it, but skipping tables means that rather than operating at the speed of light you’re operating at the speed of dark.
Joe’s Friend Pete
I had found a world-class Database Analyst who taught me what I needed to know. First, use Poke-Yoke, or Mistake Proofing. Second, run CHECKSUM on every table after a change. Third, cycle through every line of code every month to check for sanity. Even that won’t ensure that tables aren’t corrupted, and no one can fix GIGO – Garbage In/Garbage Out. Third: There is no such thing as good data.
I think that Mayor Pete, of the “Supply Chain Problems,” never read her notes.
Just after government complains about Southwest and how they might have to take over........lololol!
Mayor Pete is the walking talking result of what I named “ Not My Little Dumpling” parenting. It’s the precursor to full blown Helicopter Parents. His go to is “ we will have to look at what happened and determine what changes should be made.” That’s code for nothing is ever their fault or responsibility. So, despite not performing the duties of my job, I’m going to blame someone or something else. This is the generation that never experienced failure so therefore no lessons learned or wisdom gained. Apologies to any of you in that age group, your common sense demonstrated by your presence here excludes you from my brutal criticism.