The FAA claims that modernization of
a computer system responsible for the processing of essential
flight data is near completion. An outage in the National Airspace
Data Interchange Network (NADIN) last week caused hundreds of air
traffic delays. However, the FAA claims that important upgrades to
the system are just months from being finished.
NADIN supports the critical exchange of flight plan data,
weather information, Notices to Airmen and other flight
safety-related messages. It’s also an important link between
the FAA and countries belonging to the International Civil Aviation
Organization.
As well as FAA, system users include other U.S. government
agencies such as the National Weather Service and Departments of
Defense and Homeland Security. Commercial aviation interests access
the system, including the airlines.
Soon, all of these users will benefit from a major upgrade.
NADIN can be broadly viewed as two networks. One network provides a
data distribution capability, while the other collects it.
The collection capability is the part getting an upgrade. That
network was commissioned in 1988 and now processes more than 1.5
million messages a day. It has central message switches at
facilities in Atlanta and Salt Lake City, which serve as backups to
each other in the event that one should fail.
Data is also collected in “concentrators” located at
each of the FAA’s En Route Centers, which control
high-altitude air traffic. Currently, these concentrators are very
sensitive to network problems and have a tendency to lock up.
New high-speed servers are replacing the collection switches at
the FAA’s two primary NADIN facilities in Atlanta and Salt
Lake City, as well as the antiquated concentrators in each En Route
Center.
In addition, system gateway upgrades have already been completed
at En Route Centers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Fort Worth.
When that deployment is finished in early 2009, NADIN will have
increased storage and dramatically improved processing speed, which
will alleviate the bottlenecks the FAA has seen in the past.
An example of one such bottleneck occurred last week when the
NADIN database in Atlanta was corrupted. All of the Atlanta’s
data had to be switched to Salt Lake City, which was soon
overwhelmed with a huge surge of information. And flight delays
ensued. With the upgrades in place, that FAA says that "such
bottlenecks will be a thing of the past."
We shall see...