Technical malfunction at Skyguide – Swiss airspace closed until further notice | Hacker News Reader

Technical malfunction at Skyguide – Swiss airspace closed until further notice

skyguide.ch

32 pointsmritzmann4 comments

It's back up now.

Commercial aviation is generally well known for having redundancies in place for a lot of problems they can potentially face, so I have to wonder how big the issue was that they had to shut down an entire airspace. Could have been a one-in-a-million glitch they couldn't account for. The subsequent investigation report will be an interesting read.

A little birdy tells me it was LockBit 2.0 ransomware. Will be very interesting to see the report.

This brings to mind a crazy story about Skyguide that I heard. Skyguide was implicated in a midair collision between two aircraft in 2002. A family member of one of the deceased later murdered a Skyguide employee in an act of vengeance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_c...

I read about a different midair collision, and what was interesting is that while it seems like one in a zillion chance, with the sky being so big, the way it happened seems much more plausible in hindsight.

An airliner saw a small plane, then lost track of it, and they assumed they had passed it. Due to a misunderstanding, ATC thought they had definitely passed it. But they hadn't; the assumption was mistaken.

The Captain said: "I think he's pass(ed) off to our right."

But 'due to radio static, Lindbergh tower voice recording reveals tower received "he's passing off to our right" '

Unfortunately, the airliner was descending, unable to see directly underneath them, and the small plane was there and presumably couldn't see directly above them, so that's how they collided.

It was, according to Wikipedia, witnessed by Whoopi Goldberg and caused her to develop a fear of flying:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airlines_Fli...

Not only was everybody on the airliner and the Cessna killed, but a bunch of people on the ground too.

I never saw anything like this, but due to growing up in the flight path of a regional airport, I had recurring dreams about this sort of thing, landing in the back yard.

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