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Comment by kqgnkqgn | Hacker News Reader

Building multiple diverse paths and monitoring for fiber cuts is not hard. Having 2 fiber paths is insufficient for even only moderately important workloads at a tech company. Overlapping fiber cuts happen. For something with significant economic and safety impact this is just crazy.

Sometimes the level of incompetence / lack of care in organizations like this astounds me. I understand issues like this can be complicated and systemic but it honestly makes me think very poorly of the technologists building these systems in government.

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They had two diverse paths, but apparently did not have a (reliable?) process for ensuring the backup path was functional during fail-over. I imagine there will be some soul-searching over that.

Nothing I've ever seen or experienced with FAA indicates a lack of care; the parsimonious explanation is almost always that people who care a great deal are working within complex systems that don't always have a consistent or externally legible set of priorities. Or more intuitively, the failures we see are the "acceptable" ones versus the unacceptable ones (like planes falling out of the sky).

The problem is with considering the second path a backup path. It is a common problem with things that are considered to be a backup. In contrast, both paths should ideally have been in regular use. As a general policy, for resiliency, one should always exercise all of one's routes/suppliers/vendors, even if some are suboptimal, not just the primary one.

I completely agree. My comment is not to suggest there wasn't a problem or failure (clearly there was one!), but that we shouldn't assume incompetence versus conflicting priorities under limited resources.

> Nothing I've ever seen or experienced with FAA indicates a lack of care

Hard to fathom someone still holding that view after the 737MAX disasters.

The NTSB has repeatedly and publicly criticized the FAA for failing to implement their recommendations, including as recently as last week (Amazon Prime crash resulting in 5 deaths). They've explicitly called out the FAA's failure to act as a contributing factor in crashes, multiple times.

Regulatory capture ruined the FAA.

The FAA contracts virtually all of its communication infrastructure now, so they probably don't even know much about these details. L3Harris has the contract for microwave radio but the fiber stuff seems scattered depending on when it was built.

Funny its FAA. In planes you normally encounter dual-channel FADECs (dual ECUs) that alternate authority automagically during pre flight check.

I've told this story so many times I've worn the corners off it. BT was giving a presentation to MSN WAN OPS about the new datacenter buildout in London for us. They kept going on and on about physical security, man traps, and that our fiber left the building on each side and didn't get close to each other for so many km away.

BT guy ends that part of the presentation with "the IRA will really have to get shit together to take you off the net"

This was during the troubles. Same planet, different world.

I’m pretty sure that type of project is contracted to the private sector and isn’t caused by government technologists in any way…

That sounds pretty plausible. But you still have to have enough internal competency to oversee a contractor, and ask the right questions/build proper requirements and verify they are meeting them.

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