JANUARY 2000: HOW SOON AIR TRAVEL COULD RETURN TO NORMAL?
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A few YEARS to fix, not months!! Airlines and FAA having MAJOR problems. This is where I've been focusing my research lately.
WASHINGTON - The Federal Aviation Administration is so far behind in its efforts to fix the Year 2000 computer glitch that half the nation's air fleet may have to be grounded during the earliest days, weeks or months of the new millennium, congressional officials say.
GPS (global positioning system) will fail August 21, 1999. Well before Jan 2000. All "receivers" will have to be changed out whenever they get the "fix" worked out.
According to Senator Horne, at the rate Transportation Departments going, they should be fully compliant by 2015. Department of Energy is in the same boat.
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. - There's only two folks at IBM who know the micro-code, and they're both retired.
Message 3153561
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.
AIR TRANSPORT SUMMIT:
Message 3312437
NY TIMES: Message 3336858
USA TODAY: usatoday.com
<telecommuting and video-conferencing should benefit....>
IF ... we have electricity. LOL - Utilities WAY behind. So are telecoms. There's already been discussion about not accepting calls from certain foreign countries, come 2000.
Some utility companies who have actually been working on Y2K already admit that there will be PLANNED blackouts, brownouts and possiblity of surges.
They also admit good possibility of unplanned ones because of inter-relationships with others on the power grid. Most utilities haven't done anything on embedded systems. Weren't even aware this could be a problem until a couple of months ago.
If things are this bad in U.S. - how about foreign countries?
Cheryl |
