Why?
Sure, the skies are more and more crowded, meaning more and more people will be affected by a once-in-20 year failure, but why would it happen more and more common?
Sure, the skies are more and more crowded, meaning more and more people will be affected by a once-in-20 year failure, but why would it happen more and more common?
Failure rates must decrease proportionally to the utilization/capacity increase for the # of failures to stay constant. Otherwise, the # of failures will naturally increase, it's simple multiplication.
For example:
If crime rates stay constant, but your population increases, you have more crime - not the same amount of crime as before. you have more terrorists, you have more school shootings, because your population doubled in size and you didn't cut the rates of abhorrent behaviors in half.
Air travel has _exploded_ in popularity, this is why you see all sorts of things more frequently than you did before. From reports of airline passengers being dragged off planes in totally asinine scenarios to deaths of pets in the cabin.
And remember this wasn't a complete system outage - it affected 50% of flights, a degraded service.
In comparison the vast majority of startups that HN people work in will be lucky to last 2 years. In the last 10 years Gmail has been down, well not sure. It was down 6 times in one year. Uptime is apparently 99.8%, or down for 175 hours a decade, so 6 hours seems quite reliable.
Level 3 went down last month. And in 2016. And in 2015.
Having a system having to work for decades without downtime is unheard of in the web world, even in simple systems like gmail and AWS.
I'm not sure what the right answer is at that point. From dev-experience, I wouldn't want half-assed software directing flights. From ops-experience, I don't want software directing flights requiring specific hardware so you can just replace the hardware with easily available hardware.
I still believe we can create bug-free solution with modern toolset. It's a matter of zeros behind the project funding.
In this case, for example, it wasn't the airline. It was Eurocontrol (https://www.eurocontrol.int)
Airline tech outages are just more visible than outages in other industries. Like manufacturing, etc. It doesn't make the news when all your manufacturing plants halt for 6 hours due to tech issues. Airlines could improve, sure, but pundit observations are usually off base. They are also dependent on systems they don't control, like ATC, TSA, Airport owned kiosks, and so on.