Year 2000 Raises Safety Risk for Air Traffic Computers
From the New York Times:
nytimes.com
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON -- A set of crucial computers in the nation's air traffic control system should not be used beyond December 1999, because they may not operate reliably when the date rolls over to Jan. 1, 2000, and there is no way to predict the effect on air traffic, according to IBM, which built the computers.
But the official in charge of that system at the Federal Aviation
Administration said on Monday that "it would be an extraordinary feat" to replace about 40 mainframe computers by then. Instead, his agency, with the help of a retired IBM programmer and a team of software experts, is racing to determine whether the problems can be anticipated and eliminated before the turn of the century.
Computers all over the world will have difficulty dealing with Jan. 1, 2000 and beyond, because many of them record only the last two digits of the year, and assume that the first two are "19." For those machines, the day after Dec. 31, 1999, will be Jan. 1., 1900, not Jan. 1, 2000.
The extent of problems with the air traffic computers is not certain, but experts say that the 3083 mainframe model referred to in a letter from IBM to an FAA contractor, might, for example, refuse to accept flight plans for planes that take off on December 31, 1999, and land on Jan. 1. That landing would be 99 years in the past, from the computer's point of view. "Who knows, it could do anything," said Michael Fanfalone, the president of the the Professional Airways System Specialists the union that represents FAA technicians. There might be no problem, he said, but "no one knows until it's up and running and there's no way you can take that kind of risk."
Already, FAA teams have found, deep in the computer code, a monthly command that enables a computer to switch from one cooling pump to another; if it is not fixed, experts say, that routine could stop running, allowing the computers to overheat and fail if the pump breaks down. In fact, experts say, there could be many such land mines -- buried in millions of lines of computer code --that could cause failures for days, weeks or months after the new year.
"We're kind of worried about it," said Jack Ryan, a former FAA manager who is now the air traffic control expert at the Air Transport Association, the trade association of the major airlines. "I think the FAA has the right sense of urgency, although it's a little bit late."
Monte Belger, the associate administrator for Air Traffic Services, said in an interview that the FAA should know within 90 days whether the computers can be de-bugged. The problem is that the date functions are not in programming languages, like Fortran or Cobol, but in machine language --strings of ones and zeros more basic to the computer than even the operating system.
The FAA does not have money in its budget to replace the 3083 computers, but could probably borrow it from other areas, by delaying modernization other computers or navigational equipment. The cost is still being studied but could be as much as $200 million. In the long run, however, cost is not as important as it might seem, because the FAA had planned to replace the computers by 2003 and would like to do so sooner because IBM says spare parts for the mainframes, installed in the late 1980s, are rapidly disappearing.
The computers in question are at the 20 Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which handle all the high-altitude, long-distance traffic in the country. The 3083 models were once common in business and industry but few remain in service, experts say. IBM stopped shipping them about 10 years ago, but some of the software on the FAA models is even older, dating from the early 1970s.
The FAA has 250 separate computer systems, most of which will require fixes but the 3083 is the only one that IBM says can't be debugged before 2000.
The problem, known among information technology experts as Y2K, for the year 2000, is hardly unique to the FAA. But it is especially acute there, because the air traffic control system demands an extremely high level of reliability and because the FAA cannot bypass the software built into the 3083's that has the date problem by simply running the air-traffic programs on new computers.
At IBM, David Cassano, general manager of Year 2000 Global Initiatives, said that his company had told a few customers that no software upgrades were available for their older computers but, he
added, "it is not the majority of systems, by a long shot."
The company's Web site includes a database that shows the Y2K status of every computer system it has built. It can be found at: wwwyr2k.raleigh.ibm.com.
In the FAA's case, the computers are called the "hosts," and are used to receive data from radar scattered across thousands of square miles and integrate the images into a mosaic. Then the hosts divide that picture into sectors, the subdivisions that controllers use, and pass the data on to other computers that drive the screens at the controllers' work stations. The 3083's also receive signals from each plane stating its identity, type of equipment, altitude and destination and helps tag each radar blip with the appropriate data.
In the October letter from IBM to the FAA contractor Lockheed Martin Air Traffic Management, it said, "IBM remains convinced that the appropriate skills and tools do not exist to conduct a complete Year 2000 test assessment" of the 3083 computers. "IBM believes it is imperative that the F.A.A. replace the equipment" before 2000.
Belger of the FAA said that technicians and software engineers had taken a spare machine in Atlantic City, N.J., inserted a December 1999 date and let it roll over into the new century to look for flaws. They are not confident that this method will identify all bugs, though, he said.
Through the '80s and '90s, his agency has canceled or missed deadlines on a string of big software projects.
Whether the problem can be solved by analysis and repair or only by replacing the computers, he said, the FAA will meet the deadline. "That deadline will not change," he said dryly. Raymond Long, manager of the FAA's Year 2000 Program office, which is eight months old, said
his agency had found former IBM programmers with relevant expertise. Some of them developed tools for analyzing the software after leaving IBM, Long said, and the FAA is using those tools.
Long said that his personal plan for Dec. 31, 1999, was to fly an airplane around the country to show that his office had succeeded. The flight would be mid-evening on New Year's Eve, he said, because the air traffic system works on Greenwich mean time, five hours ahead of Eastern time. And he added that he would check that the software aboard the plane had been certified as "Y2K compliant."
Others are still worried. Fanfalone of the technician's union said, "There's only two folks at IBM who know the micro-code, and they're both retired.
"The FAA pulled one of them in, to go through the code, but they should have brought 10 software people over," he said.
And another deadline is coming on Feb. 29, 2000. Long said that most computers are not programmed to recognize years ending in "00" as leap years. But 2000 is a leap year.
Ryan, of the Air Traffic Association, says the larger problem is that no one knows what else lurks in the 30-year-old software.
"I don't know what I don't know, and that's what's very worrisome about it," he said.
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LOL,
Gerry |
