Posted on 01/21/2023 6:17:59 AM PST by DoodleBob
The Federal Aviation Administration offered an update late Thursday on the system failure that led to last week's nationwide ground stop of air travel, attributing the breakdown to a mistake made by a contractor servicing the Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system.
“A preliminary FAA review of last week's outage of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system determined that contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database,” the agency said in a statement, noting that there was, so far, no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious intent.
The ground stop occurred for nearly two hours on the morning of Jan. 11 as officials worked to restart the NOTAM system — which provides real-time flight operations information about possible risks — following what the FAA called an overnight outage.
While the FAA had already been previously working with industry to modernize the system prior to the outage, at least one trade association, the National Business Aviation Association, called for improved backup capabilities to the system in the wake of the outage.
NBAA officials declined to comment to FCW following the FAA update, but had previously characterized the NOTAM system as a “disorganized catch-all with no priority hierarchy,” in 2020.
The FAA is continuing with updates to the NOTAM system, including transitioning to standards established by the International Civil Aviation Organization slated for completion by 2024.
Any system upgrade or change is tested out in DEV. Once that's looking good, it is moved to the UAT server for further testing.
Only after ALL scripts and other "try to break it" testing is performed without any problems, THEN everything is copied to PROD.
There is no way "contract personnel unintentionally deleted files".
I'm not saying this was a cyberattack. I believe it's simply government doing what government does best...making lives miserable to obtain more funding.
Tucker reported the same thing happened next day in Trudeau Land , which has atotally different air traffic control system.
I would put it a different way. The files were intentionally deleted by the contractor because that one person had no idea what the impact would be and how it could affect the entire system. This happens alot during system O&M.
There’s a certain feeling you get the moment you delete the wrong file.
The contractor randos should NOT have access to PROD.
That is assuming the FAA et al work that way. If the FAA simply lets a contractor have PROD access and make changes on the fly, heads should roll.
I heard a news story / propaganda piece where this failure was used to lament about the "antiquated" system and "more money is needed or else Bad Things will happen."
The FAA is very likely covering up the truth. A cyber-attack is probably the cause, as in Canada and the Phillipines recently.
Those federal agencies would rather lie than tell the truth to the citizenry. It’s “ for your own good “.
What a crock.
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Add to this that both Canada and the Philippines - neither connected to the US network - suffered the same exact problem, plus all three incident correlates nicely with the sudden rise in crypto currency activity.
Almost as if someone were paying out large amounts of crypto to some other party ...
Lotta “glitches” around here these days…..
A trick they’ve put into circulation for when they really need it is my guess. “oh you remember the last time this happened.”
I worked with Canadian Air Force air traffic controllers. I didn’t think they did anything any differently than I did.
also the Philippines on new yeas day, testing testing
The glitch in the system was probably caused by some DIE hires wondering what happens if I do dis.
In a lot of architecture technology systems those who know how those legacy systems operate are retiring or moving on to the spirit world. Those backfilling have no historical context so the plan is to replace with something new or find a patch. New is expensive so the patch becomes the fix with the system resembling a jigsaw puzzle with misshaped pieces forced together.
AND, the Philippines had the same outage on New Years Eve!!!!
“Tucker reported the same thing happened next day in Trudeau Land , which has a totally different air traffic control system.”
And Canada PRIVATIZED their air traffic control system long ago, so a breakdown like this should not be possible there, since private industry never makes mistakes, only government, yet...
Worked many government contracts over the years, including the FAA.
It was standard practice in the bureaucracy to “blame a contractor” whenever things went wrong. Of course, the reason they had contractors was because nobody in government had the smarts to do it in house.
(Exception: Increasingly in recent years the government agencies have hired affirmative action contractors and out-sourced foreign contractors and there you will find incompetence and failures.)
It was very difficult to incorporate new technologies into existing practices and processes (e.g., FAA air traffic modernization, Social Security and IRS financial transactions, federal and state voting processes) when the bureaucrat in charge didn’t know the technology but was more interested in he/ she pronouns and climate change effects in a specification or design document or an operations manual
I worked for a federal agency during a huge financial system changeover. We replaced one system with a completely new system. Normal procedure would be to run both simultaneously during a test period to ensure the new system is posting transactions properly. Nope. Overnight they turned the old one off and the new one on. That was fun.
> “I’m not saying this was a cyberattack. I believe it’s simply government doing what government does best...making lives miserable to obtain more funding.”
When I see unexplained or poorly explained incidents such as this, I think of it as dry run testing taken to limited action theater.
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