Week 3Hand-in Assignment -3 Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Week 3Hand-in -3 - Assignment Example Hartsfield is the world’s busiest airport by passenger traffic and the Agency quickly recognized it had a big problem. In accordance with its redundancy procedures, the system was switched to its Salt Lake City, Utah facility. That was no doubt a bad mistake, for Salt Lake City was much smaller than Atlanta and not equipped to handle such immense traffic. It too crashed with in a short period of time and because of the airlines’ â€Å"hub and spoke† system the ripple effect was felt all up and down the East Coast. With the additional effect of bad weather, American had to cancel â€Å"40 or 50† flights and Southwest admitted forty per cent of its air traffic in the East was either cancelled or delayed. A spokesman for the Controllers said â€Å"the problem forced controllers to enter flight information manually†. Once again the old style Flight Progress Strips proved to be what saved the day (CBS 2009). Unfortunately for the FAA, Salt Lake City was the test bed for its new Next Gen computer system specifically the En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) computer, specially designed for the higher flying larger aircraft such as the Boeing 787 and the Airbus 380, each of which can hold hundreds of passengers. ERAM, based upon Global Positioning System (GPS), was supposed to replace equipment using radar technology that has its roots in World War II, seventy years old. However, after the Atlanta fiasco, the newest computer system was put on hold for several years to come but Salt Lake will continue to provide testing material (Lowy 2010). Yet the system, however antiquated, seems to work quite well. In calendar year 2011, revenue passenger aircraft flew almost 567 million miles just domestically in the United States. That does not count thousands more military, cargo and private flights. Nor does it take into account at least that many more international air carriers arriving