The Anonymous Widower

Who Needs Guns And Bombs When There Are Crap Programmers About?

Last nights problems with the UK Air Traffic Control, are an illustration, that increasingly our complex world, is prone to the problem of bad software or systems. It only needs just one bug or failure, accidental or deliberate, to cause all sorts of chaos.

I have always held the view, that those that design and manage technology like banking systems, on-shore oil fields, should live in the community.

The banks have off-shored much of their programming in recent years and I believe it is a factor in the service they provide. It has happened recently some banks have had cashpoint failures. Suppose you were a programmer doing that work for the Bank of Mattress and like many, after a stressful week, you perhaps had a drink with mates in the local on a Friday night. Imagine the conversation, if your bank had had a serious failure in the previous week. So to not lose face, you make sure you and your team do a good job. But if the system is programmed in say Bangalore or San Francisco, the offenders escape the sanction of their friends.

But it’s not just computer systems.

Look at the problems with extracting oil and gas in the UK. We have had the odd disaster like the very serious Piper Alpha, but I can’t find a serious oil spill in the UK onshore in recent years.

You could say that there isn’t much oil and gas fields onshore in the UK. But look at Wytch Farm. Wikipedia says this about the oil field.

Wytch Farm is an oil field and processing facility in the Purbeck district of Dorset, England. It is the largest onshore oil field in western Europe. The facility, recently taken over byPerenco was previously operated by BP. It is hidden in a coniferous forest on Wytch Heath on the southern shore of Poole Harbour, two miles (3 km) north of Corfe Castle. Oil and natural gas (methane) are both exported by pipeline; liquefied petroleum gas is exported by road tanker.

Most people have never heard of it, but it sits there unnoticed in the heart of the Jurassic Coast. Incidentally, some of the horizontal drilling techniques that are used in fracking were developed in this field, to get oil out of the far corners of the field. Wikipedia mentions that here.

Could, the field’s invisibility in the media and the public’s imagination be down to the fact that no bad news has come from the field? And could this be due to the fact most of those working on Wytch Farm life locally and obviously would never want to soil their own doorstep?

So to return to the ATC problems!

Did management rely on programmers that were less than perfect and not local?

As someone who knows about both programming and flying, I suspect that the design of the system wasn’t what it should have been.

At least no-one suffered anything worse than a delayed flight.

But system failures like this always worry me, as they give terrorists an easy way to disrupt our lives.

We should always remember the Italian Job, where criminals fixed Turin’s traffic computer system, to help them steal the money.

Truth is often stranger than fiction!

December 13, 2014 - Posted by AnonW | Computing, Transport/Travel | Energy, Flying