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Atlanta Airport Shutdown Creates Travel Chaos

Last nights Atlanta airport shutdown caused a huge disruption in travel to passengers throughout the USA as the ripple effect of a major hub closure effected major airline schedules in the hub and spoke system.

With an average of 275,000 passengers and 2,500 planes arriving and departing each day Hartsfield-Jackson serves around 104 million passengers a year and is the world's busiest airport, a record held since 1998.

Airports usually will have fast transfer backup generation for all the safety-critical functions like Air traffic control, navaids and runway lighting.

Terminal facilities however may not be on that system. Atlanta is a massive terminal complex drawing a huge amount of power from the local grid. Fire codes would require the buildings to be equipped with emergency lighting probably the only backup that exists in the terminals.

This event has obviously been at a single point of failure for the entire Atlanta airport complex and from the reports of a fire in an underground Georgia Power facility at the airport. Georgia Power staff then had to get in there to repair the equipment after the fire had been extinguished before power was restored, and it would seem that the one facility was the switch gear between standby power and grid power.

Under ideal design concepts each concourse should have at least some level of individual back-up minus major draw non essential items. The train system between concourses have a separate system, and of course no single point failure that can effect all of them.

As one of America’s major airline terminals, and Delta’s main headquarters (one of America’s largest airlines) it would seem that a big re-think/examination would be in order, for not only Atlanta, but some of the other major airports in the USA’s hub and spoke air travel system, some of whom are as old or older.
 
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You would have thought the American's would have learned about the vulnerability of airport power and control grids from the attempt to take over Washington Dulles ATC by mercenaries (heroically stopped by officer John McClane).


About the same time of year as well!
 
When our company does FMEA (failure mode & effect analysis) and similar HAZOP (Hazard & Operability) studies we often find that there is a single node through which all the systems run which is known as "common mode failure".

It would not be the first time that we had seen an entire site shut down due to the failure of a single length of cable or single switchroom. One particular classic was when a certain site (no names) was shut down for 2 weeks after a JCB driver put the bucket through an 11kV feed cable. The resulting surge also damaged some of the control equipment on site.

The other common misconception is that standby generators will start automatically even when you don't bother to maintain or do functional checks on them.
 
One particular classic was when a certain site (no names) was shut down for 2 weeks after a JCB driver put the bucket through an 11kV feed cable.
I remember something similar at Heathrow about 92-93 when a JCB went through a fibre optic loom to a satellite uplink. Our mainframe was in Texas, the uplink stopped us for days.
 
The only saving grace here is that it happened in winter (almost!). Had it been in the summer, with no air conditioning and 100 deg F ambient temp, fatalities among babies and elderly might have been on the cards. Certainly would have had to manage it differently and probably evacuate the concourses, rather than let people sleep there. Apparently the failure was in E concourse, which is quite a long way from the terminals and A/B/C/D concourses. Seems a bit of a dog toffee design if a failure in E trashes the whole 9 yards. Even F, which is all but new.
 
Who cares, its in the US, Trump will blame the following:
News Reporters/FBI/Aliens/Arabs/Hilary Clinton/His own staff/Mexico/Immigrants/North Korea, this list is endless!
 
Scarey how our dependence on computers can wreck our world pretty quickly

It's more than just the computers. Baggage handling systems, the people-moving train between concourses (it's well over a mile from one end to the other), the elevators & escalators between the train and concourses, the security scanners, the jet bridges to the aircraft, the bog flushers (automatic/timed bog flushing), the fuel pumps for refueling, the food service both replenning the aircraft and inside the airport, airfield lighting, etc etc etc.

I've been on flights out of ATL before where the gate agent's computer has gone tits and they've manually boarded the flight, rather than scan everything, but it was only that system that failed, not the whole 9 yards.

Edited to add, come to think of it, I've flown in and out of ATL when the jet bridge has got stuck, the people mover has failed, the escalators have failed, bags were not loaded and the bogs were swimming in piss. But these were all on separate flights. All of these will have happened to every gate and every aircraft yesterday. Bugger that.
 
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What does it have to do with Trump to begin with?

Don't you know? Everything in the world has something to do with Trump. You can't even watch a cat licking itself on YouTube without some retard mentioning Donald ******* Trump in the comments section.
 
Don't you know? Everything in the world has something to do with Trump. You can't even watch a cat licking itself on YouTube without some retard mentioning Donald ******* Trump in the comments section.

I like to play spot the Brexit reference on the online comments on BBC news. Even on something that is a million miles away from politics.
 
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