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To: Quad Sevens who wrote (12818)	11/11/1997 7:35:00 PM
From: Roger A. Babb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18263

Wade, the only outfit I know with less credibility than Emerald is Westergard. As to the claims of power outages in 2000, I work in the power industry and can assure you that power plants are currently being tested with their clocks set to 2000 and any bugs fixed. But I won't place any bets on the validity of the first power bill you get in 2000............

To: Quad Sevens who wrote (12818)	11/11/1997 9:19:00 PM
From: Mark L.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18263

I can't comment on Westergard's predictions about the IRS, etc., but I can comment on his Federal Express prediction. Let's suppose that he is correct that all FAA computers were to simply stop functioning at midnight on December 31, 1999. This is no different from a radar outage. There are procedures in effect currently for non-radar environments, and unfortunately pilots periodically have to use them. They are cumbersome, unpleasant, and involve greater separation in terminal environments, but they don't mean that planes sit on the ground. In my estimation the impact on Federal Express's business would be less than the UPS strike. And all this is assuming that the FAA computers would simply stop--an assertion I highly doubt. Assuming that there is a problem at all, it would affect daytime carriers more than nighttime carriers like Federal Express, because at feeder airports there are usually loads of available slots at night. Admittedly that may not be true of Memphis, but I still wouldn't rush out to short FedEx just yet. This is not to say that there may not be FAA problems or that everything will be compliant by 1/1/00. However, even if it's not, the problems won't mean the end of air travel. They'll just mean a little slowdown and some higher fuel consumption. In general, I am afraid that fear-mongers like Westergard are making comments concerning industries about which they know very little.