Re:The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my wor...
by _delirium on Tuesday September 01, 2015 @08:25PM
(#10156726)
I'm skeptical that the culprit is mainly to be found in specific features of the FAA, and the article doesn't seem to provide much causal evidence of that (though I recognize that it's hard to prove that kind of causality). Major upgrades/replacements/migrations either failing or coming in a decade late and billions over budget is the norm in Fortune 500 companies, too, which leads to a hypothesis that it's a more general problem with big rewrites of safety/business-critical systems in large organizations.
Re:The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my wor...
by monochromatic on Tuesday September 01, 2015 @10:05PM
(#10157043)
> billions over budget
Well, maybe millions. A billion dollars is real money to anything except the federal government.
It doesn't specificaly mention vacuum tubes, but it does explain why it's entirely plausible that they're still around:
>This technology is complicated and novel, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that NextGen is a project of the FAA. The agency is primarily a regulatory body, responsible for keeping the national airspace safe, and yet it is also in charge of operating air traffic control, an inherent conflict that causes big issues when it comes to upgrades. Modernization, a struggle for any federal agency, is practically antithetical to the FAA's operational culture, which is risk-averse, methodical, and bureaucratic. Paired with this is the lack of anything approximating market pressure. The FAA is the sole consumer of the product; it's a closed loop.