How Air-Traffic Controllers Sound When They Have to Close the Airport

Re:How Air-Traffic Controllers Sound When They Have to Close... by rl3 on Saturday March 07, 2015 @04:42AM (#9161461)

>Their training also focuses quite a bit on constant recall of what they're looking at (in the event their systems suddenly die, they need to always know what planes are in their sequence and where generally they are) ...

That seems brutal. Wonder why they don't do something like a continuous print instead.

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Re:How Air-Traffic Controllers Sound When They Have to Close... by jkaljundi on Saturday March 07, 2015 @05:05AM (#9161493)

Many ATC facilities do use backup printers for the good old flight progress strips. Basically a continuous roll of strips coming from the printer that usually goes directly into a garbage bin.

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Re:How Air-Traffic Controllers Sound When They Have to Close... by frandroid on Saturday March 07, 2015 @03:04PM (#9162920)

If the systems suddenly die, they don't have time to consult a printout, they need to KNOW which planes to shuffle off or else there will be accidents; reading the information off a printout is way too slow. If the system RAM dies, the humans are the effective backup RAM.

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