10 year anniversary on 31 December 2009
On call to usher in a new millennium
I am no longer with IATA but when I joined originally, night shifts were not mentioned as part of the job. Not that I would have minded, as an ex-air traffic controller I had plenty of experience watching the sun rise over the airport perimeter fence, or looking at the radar screen with the morning traffic building slowly…
But somehow 1999 brought two events that landed me once again in night shifts. One was 8.33, the famous new channel spacing in Europe and the other, the even more famous, Y2K computer bug.
As it happened, I was not closely involved in the preparations for the year-end rollover, this task having fallen in our office to other colleagues who had their hands more than full for the 18 months or so preceding the end of December . As our readers will probably know, the Y2K problem was the result of some “clever” programming tricks used by early programmers to save storage space, representing the year in dates by only two characters. Possibly they never expected computers to be still around by the year 2000… In the end, not only did some legacy hardware, as well as a lot of legacy software, survive to see the new millennium, even some of the latest creations came with the Y2K problem still built in and ticking away…If you enter a date in the year 2000 into one of those machines, the year will show 00, resulting in the computer possibly crashing in a number of colorful ways.
To cut a long story short, when the problem was first recognized, the IT industry was at first slow to react, apparently hoping that it would somehow just go away. After all, fixing the bug required getting rid of some hopelessly outdated, but still performing, hardware and also the painstaking review of millions of lines of code to pluck out any instances of the two-digit year. The amount of money required was staggering…
However, as the new millennium drew unrelenting nearer, the Y2K problem was finally being taken seriously and by early 1998 banks, public utilities and other industries heavily dependent on computers started updating their systems.
A problem like Y2K is of course something that the aviation industry had to take very very seriously. Led by IATA, the industry Y2K program was set up as early as 1996, with a specific Air Traffic Services Airports program starting towards the end of 1997.
Obviously, getting aircraft and airline computer systems Y2K compliant was only part of the game. The rest of the infrastructure, ATC systems, communications switches, airport lighting systems and many other supporting elements of the operation had to pass muster before we could say we were ready for the new millennium. The IATA Y2K experts went far and wide, visiting all corners of the world to help States with their Y2K preparations. This was in itself a delicate exercise, after all, no one likes to admit that they are likely to have a problem. The admirable job they did was apparent in the open and frank dialogue that ensued and which, in the end, resulted in most of the problems being revealed and solutions, or at least workarounds, being put in place.
To keep an eye on what was happening on this last night of the 20th century, a system of regional Y2K co-ordination units, spanning the globe as it was, was put in place. These units were working together with ICAO, and in the case of Europe, also EUROCONTROL.
Our RCU (Regional Coordination Unit) was located at EUROCONTROL Headquarters in Brussels and to accommodate it, the IATA Liaison Cell had been transformed into a veritable command center. Not a quiet place at the best of times, the liaison cell became a beehive of activity towards the end of December 1999. Desks were moved, extra charts were put on the walls and finally, the equipment that would support us during the rollover was installed. Perhaps as a sign of the times, the Y2K computer bug was going to be fought using specially configured laptop computers and powerful networking products. All Y2K compliant of course…
The role of the RCU was to collect status reports from States and promulgate the information to airlines participating in the Y2K program. The Brussels RCU was covering a swash of the globe from Eastern Siberia to the Canadian border (not including the Middle-East and North Africa), meaning that there were many Flight Information Regions (FIR) to hear bad news from… But of course, the expectation was that things would carry on as normal and disruptions, if any, would remain local and manageable. No one in the air that night would have any reason to worry, there would always be a place to land safely.
It is never easy to put together a computer based communications system, especially if the whole setup is really quite temporary… Contact addresses are likely to change until the last minute, bugs, oops sorry, I should have said “undocumented features”, in software crop up when least expected, bomb-proof communications lines refuse to work…IATA had organized a series of dry runs of the total system to iron out any quirks and also to get us, the operators of the system, up to speed on the various procedures and alternative means of spreading the news on this critical night.
With all the preparations behind my back, I started the night shift on 31 December 1999 at 17.00 UTC, looking with just a little worry at the tangle of wires and innocent looking laptops in the RCU… How did they work to day? After all, a part of the world has already experienced their local-time rollover and was living in the 21st century. But in aviation, we all live by UTC time, and on that basis, the year 2000 was still some seven hours away…
The guys of the day shift had little to report, our communications and computer systems have worked as expected and no Y2K related degradations have been reported from anywhere East of us. With the day shift gone, we went to work, almost feeling the pressure of local midnight marching towards us.
While waiting for the first reporting period to arrive (we were sending out updates every hour, at 30 minutes past), I had time to contemplate a few things, like how does one dress for such an occasion? I mean, you are likely to experience a new millennium only once in a lifetime and if you have to spend that on the job… Most people seemed to have chosen an attire somewhere between full business and business casual. Well, I am a guy who never takes off his shoes in an aircraft until we are high enough so that it does not matter any more… and so for this night I had put on my commando pants (I do get lonely without all the pockets) and heavy boots. A flashlight on a chain prompted a few people to ask where I had left my axe? Good question, but what if the lights had actually gone out or if we had to evacuate the building? But I diverge…
The first two reporting periods came and went, with no problems signaled and our systems still performing flawlessly. Then Mr. Murphy struck. A few of our airline contacts called in saying that they were not receiving our reports any more… While the IT folks in Montreal scrambled to untangle the clogged electronic highways, we reverted to our ultimate fallback, good old teletype. OK, it was still Windows based instead of clanking TTY machines, but compared to the fancy and custom built software tool we should have been using, it had a distinctly musty smell to it. But it worked and soon all the airlines waiting for the all-important latest news on which to base their go-no go decision were once again in the picture. One thing is sure, the many hours spent during the dry runs practicing on all the communications means had paid off handsomely. TTY was cumbersome and slow, but it did get the job done and airlines did get the required information. What more could we want?
I the meantime, our hearts went out to those guys in Montreal whose job it was to keep the system humming. With all the RCUs running on fallback procedures, they must have been under enormous pressure to fix whatever had persuaded the servers to go belly up at the worst possible moment. And fix them they did! Within three hours we were back to normal with the system actually running smoother than before.
Reports from States continued to flow in, and there were no problems anywhere. It was kind of exciting and boring at the same time. We also got hungry… EUROCONTROL rose to the occasion and put on a wonderful buffet dinner, served free to all Y2K personnel on duty! Tilted heavily towards seafood, but also including other delicacies, the buffet served as a nice diversion from the night’s routine.
There is only one hour difference between local midnight in Brussels and UTC midnight and of course we were expecting, as planned, a real rush of reports from European States as we passed those two significant points in time. But again, Europe rolled into the new millennium without any problems. A few States were a bit late telling us this and hence our own reports to the airlines went out a little late, but that was all.
Suddenly, we too were living in the 21st century!
With the noise of the Brussels fireworks heard dimly through the thick glass of the RCU locale and my shift still running until 05.00 UTC, I sat back, more relaxed now, contemplating what ALL THIS HAS REALLY MEANT?
Well, first of all it meant that I did not need my flashlight and the heavy boots have also turned out to be a bit of an overkill. It also meant, more importantly, that everybody flying that night and beyond, was safe thanks to the efforts of the whole industry and the program put together, and led by, IATA. Without this concerted action, we might have had a very different night on the 31st of December 1999.
A few minutes before 06.00 local time, with the day shift having taken over, I walked towards my car in the still dark and wet Brussels morning, the words of the Finnair skipper we talked to on the phone a few minutes after he landed in Helsinki echoing in my mind. “The only thing we noticed of the roll-over was that we could depart Malaga without any delay….”. This sounded like a good omen for the new Millenium.