I was thinking about this whenever I hear about airlines going down when their dinosaur-mainframe software breaks. How about each airport PRINTS an hourly update with ETAs for each inbound plane, where they intend it to depart, and the disposition for the crew of each plane. maybe even IDNs for all the baggage on each plane and each outbound passenger. Might take up 20-30 pages per hour at a non-hub airport. hubs could have their own "edge" device that can print on demand if the mainframe dies.
If the db goes down, make a bunch of copies of that paper, disseminate them, and keep running. worst case is planes don't run at 100% capacity. Just do the best you can to keep the next few legs going without the mothership telling you what to do. Shouldn't be that hard. I know one of the biggest constraints is that crew members run out of fly-able hours. So print that in the backup too: X pilot has Y hours left after HH::MM zulu time. Maybe lobby FAA to allow pilots to fly a few hr past their maximum a few times a year only if the scheduler goes down. I just dont accept that these billion-dollar networks should be this susceptible to disruption given the current state of tech.
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I was thinking about this whenever I hear about airlines going down when their dinosaur-mainframe software breaks. How about each airport PRINTS an hourly update with ETAs for each inbound plane, where they intend it to depart, and the disposition for the crew of each plane. maybe even IDNs for all the baggage on each plane and each outbound passenger. Might take up 20-30 pages per hour at a non-hub airport. hubs could have their own "edge" device that can print on demand if the mainframe dies.
If the db goes down, make a bunch of copies of that paper, disseminate them, and keep running. worst case is planes don't run at 100% capacity. Just do the best you can to keep the next few legs going without the mothership telling you what to do. Shouldn't be that hard. I know one of the biggest constraints is that crew members run out of fly-able hours. So print that in the backup too: X pilot has Y hours left after HH::MM zulu time. Maybe lobby FAA to allow pilots to fly a few hr past their maximum a few times a year only if the scheduler goes down. I just dont accept that these billion-dollar networks should be this susceptible to disruption given the current state of tech.