Why do 40-year-olds control air traffic?

At any given time in the US airspace is about 7,000 aircraft. At the same time over the past 40 years, the same computer systems are used to control air traffic, writes Wired. This relic of the 70s is known Host - a sample of outdated equipment, which can not refuse.

Key Host modules are designed before the advent of the GPS global positioning system, so Host uses ground-based radar to determine the coordinates of each aircraft.

“Every day, thousands of passengers activate“ flight mode ”in their GPS smartphones, and their flight is controlled by technology developed even before Depeche Mode,” writes Wired.
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In fact, it looks incredible. The passenger can determine his location more precisely than the navigation system installed in the control room, from where commands are sent to the pilot.

Although the Host system is completely safe, it is monstrously ineffective. It handles a limited amount of traffic, and dispatchers do not see anything beyond the reach of their own radar. When the plane leaves the next segment, it simply disappears from sight. Because of this, the control centers cannot insure each other. If power suddenly disappears in one of them, then air traffic has to be completely stopped in this area, as happened on September 26, 2014 in Chicago, when a local employee decided to commit suicide by setting a fire in the server room before that. As a result, the airlines had to cancel 6600 flights within 17 days.

The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is well aware of the problem and has been trying to implement a series of phased upgrades for the NextGen project for 11 years. This is a new computer system with which each dispatcher will be able to observe every aircraft in the US airspace. In theory, this will allow one traffic control center to insure another.

But in reality, the introduction of NextGen has turned into a real nightmare, with a lot of delays, revisions and unexpected problems. Corporation Lockheed Martin began developing software in the distant 2002 and was supposed to finish in 2010.

In 2007, the system was subjected to a series of tests and found a huge number of bugs. She confused flights and airplanes, and sometimes the aircraft disappeared from the screen without a trace.

Lockheed Martin tried to fix the bugs, but the program continued to fail. In April 2014, the system collapsed in the Los Angeles Flight Control Center when a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flew into the airspace at an altitude of over 18,000 meters, twice the height of passenger aircraft, which disrupted the logic of NextGen.

The next deadline for NextGen is set for spring 2015: five years later the originally planned time limit and with an excess of the project budget of $ 500 million, writes Wired.

Perhaps, even now everything will pass without failures. But even in this case, the infrastructure of the air traffic control centers is not ready to use the new software. It is necessary to change the lines of communication. The FAA does not plan to implement VoIP-based communications until 2018. Even in the best case, dispatch centers will not be able to track all aircraft using GPS before 2020.