November 15, 2015 at 12:39The French airport got up due to a failure of Windows 3.1, the 1992 operating system
Airport "Orly" , which is fourteen kilometers from Paris, stopped operating due to errors in the Windows 3.1 , which runs on the warning system DECOR weather conditions. This version of Windows was released by Microsoft in 1992 and, among the innovations, had the game “Minesweeper” for training the accuracy of hitting the cursor on the screen.
“In Paris, there are only three specialists who can deal with problems at DECOR. Next year, one of them will retire, and we have no idea who could replace him, ”says Alexander Fiakr, general secretary of the UNSA-IESSA union of aviation unions.
On November 7, fog stood over Paris-Orly airport. Air traffic controllers could not tell the pilots about the visibility on the runway, because there was a malfunction in the “Orly and Roissy environmental data management system” - DECOR, “diffusion des données d'environnement contrôle d'Orly et de Roissy”. The same system works at the largest airport in Europe - Paris-Charles de Gaulle, in all - at fourteen airports in France. And the system works on Windows 3.1 , released in 1992.
The tools used by Aéroports de Paris operate on four different operating systems, released ten to twenty years ago. Some systems run on UNIX, the university’s and startups ’favorite operating system in the 1980s.
Microsoft released Windows 3.1, adding scalable TrueType fonts and the Minesweeper game to the system, and for the first time support for multimedia content appeared.
General Secretary of the Association of Aircraft Unions Alexander Fiacre compares the problems with the DECOR system on Windows 3.1 with the difficulties that NASA encountered with the Voyager program. The program was launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 run on General Electric processors with a clock frequency of 250 kilohertz. Today's smartphones and smart watches are much more powerful than these computers forty years ago. Machines use outdated programming languages such as FORTRAN. And very soon, the last engineer from the original team Larry Zotarelli retires .
The agency needs to seek out an expert in programming from the 1970s. NASA hopes that it will be possible to persuade Zotarelli to work with a young specialist for a year in order to teach him how to interact with the Voyager 1, which is located at a distance of about 20 billion kilometers from Earth.
Fortran Perforated Column Layout Card
French aviation engineers face difficulties finding machine components. Sometimes parts for computer systems have to look for on eBay. And in any case, they are not designed for twenty years of work. The French Minister of Transport promises that "the equipment will be updated by 2017." Fiacre believes that this is too optimistic forecast. He is confident that the update will happen at best by 2019, if not by 2021.
Fortunately, a failure in the system did not endanger the lives and health of passengers. Air traffic controllers took all necessary measures, including canceled a number of flights.
If you think that for airports a tool that runs on an operating system almost twenty-five years ago is something out of the ordinary, then you are mistaken. In December 2014, airspace over London was closed for thirty-six minutes , fifty flights were canceled due to a malfunction in software fifty years old, writes Vice News. In the summer of 2015, two hackers received from United Airlines a lifetime status of PremiumGold customers and a million miles for traveling for discovering bugs in the system: one of the failures in June 2015 led to a violationSchedules of three and a half thousand flights.
London. © TASS / EPA / WILL OLIVER
Other transportation services have similar problems. A significant part of the equipment of the New York Metro has not been updated for more than 100 years : employees manually maintain a train log and manually control the arrows and signals that inform train operators when it is safe to pass through a particular section of tracks.
Everyone remembers the joke, ending with the phrase: "Then for God's sake, son, do not touch anything, do not change anything." Crashes in legacy systems suggest that it's time to change something.
“In Paris, there are only three specialists who can deal with problems at DECOR. Next year, one of them will retire, and we have no idea who could replace him, ”says Alexander Fiakr, general secretary of the UNSA-IESSA union of aviation unions.
On November 7, fog stood over Paris-Orly airport. Air traffic controllers could not tell the pilots about the visibility on the runway, because there was a malfunction in the “Orly and Roissy environmental data management system” - DECOR, “diffusion des données d'environnement contrôle d'Orly et de Roissy”. The same system works at the largest airport in Europe - Paris-Charles de Gaulle, in all - at fourteen airports in France. And the system works on Windows 3.1 , released in 1992.
The tools used by Aéroports de Paris operate on four different operating systems, released ten to twenty years ago. Some systems run on UNIX, the university’s and startups ’favorite operating system in the 1980s.
Microsoft released Windows 3.1, adding scalable TrueType fonts and the Minesweeper game to the system, and for the first time support for multimedia content appeared.
General Secretary of the Association of Aircraft Unions Alexander Fiacre compares the problems with the DECOR system on Windows 3.1 with the difficulties that NASA encountered with the Voyager program. The program was launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 run on General Electric processors with a clock frequency of 250 kilohertz. Today's smartphones and smart watches are much more powerful than these computers forty years ago. Machines use outdated programming languages such as FORTRAN. And very soon, the last engineer from the original team Larry Zotarelli retires .
The agency needs to seek out an expert in programming from the 1970s. NASA hopes that it will be possible to persuade Zotarelli to work with a young specialist for a year in order to teach him how to interact with the Voyager 1, which is located at a distance of about 20 billion kilometers from Earth.
Fortran Perforated Column Layout Card
French aviation engineers face difficulties finding machine components. Sometimes parts for computer systems have to look for on eBay. And in any case, they are not designed for twenty years of work. The French Minister of Transport promises that "the equipment will be updated by 2017." Fiacre believes that this is too optimistic forecast. He is confident that the update will happen at best by 2019, if not by 2021.
Fortunately, a failure in the system did not endanger the lives and health of passengers. Air traffic controllers took all necessary measures, including canceled a number of flights.
If you think that for airports a tool that runs on an operating system almost twenty-five years ago is something out of the ordinary, then you are mistaken. In December 2014, airspace over London was closed for thirty-six minutes , fifty flights were canceled due to a malfunction in software fifty years old, writes Vice News. In the summer of 2015, two hackers received from United Airlines a lifetime status of PremiumGold customers and a million miles for traveling for discovering bugs in the system: one of the failures in June 2015 led to a violationSchedules of three and a half thousand flights.
London. © TASS / EPA / WILL OLIVER
Other transportation services have similar problems. A significant part of the equipment of the New York Metro has not been updated for more than 100 years : employees manually maintain a train log and manually control the arrows and signals that inform train operators when it is safe to pass through a particular section of tracks.
Everyone remembers the joke, ending with the phrase: "Then for God's sake, son, do not touch anything, do not change anything." Crashes in legacy systems suggest that it's time to change something.