
Whiteboards used after Gatwick flight information screens fail - gpresot
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-45247499
======
BillinghamJ
Seems like a pretty big success to me. They had a contingency plan and it was
implemented successfully. No cancelled flights and minimal delays - good job.

~~~
Reason077
Presumably it helps that many (most?) travellers will be using the airline's
apps these days, which provide info such as boarding times and gate updates.

~~~
kalleboo
In my experience, all the apps (airport, airline, travel apps, even Apple
Wallet e-tickets) all have unreliable or heavily delayed gate information.
Does anyone really rely on them?

~~~
Reason077
Info viewed directly in the Apple Wallet screen is delayed, for sure. That
applies to all apps - the tickets/"cards" don't seem to refresh that often.
But what you see inside the app should generally be up to date, although I
guess not all apps are equal.

The US airline's apps tend to be very good, sending you real time
notifications of gate changes and flight delays. On Delta, the app even took
me directly to a rebooking function when it notified me of a flight delay
during a layover in ATL. Very good UX.

~~~
monksy
Depends on the airline. United's app is terrible about updating on gate
changes.

Jetblue is incredibly sensitive about any change and will do a push
notification for it. (Your flight landed 2 minutes late, etc)

~~~
warrenm
United's hit-or-miss: _sometimes_ they're Johnny on the Spot

Other times? Yeah...not so much

(they're better when you enable push notifications for your flights (and I set
up SMS notifications, too))

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barbegal
This was a failure of a fibre connection to the internet and a cloud service.

Oddly enough, Gatwick's CIO was last week [1] telling journalists that he
didn't like to rely on the cloud:

"The airport has used multi-tenanted public cloud in the past, but for that to
work perfectly you need your telecom providers to work well, the path across
internet to work, the hosting firm's telecoms to work, and their data centre
support and monitoring not to drop. We have had examples where even in the
public cloud using dedicated slices, you can suffer from noisy neighbours, and
we just can't have that. Our operations are too important to us, so we need to
keep it close. We use cloud for resilience, and we're very pro-cloud, but not
for core services."

So it seems odd that departure boards were being fed from a cloud service.
Maybe they hadn't been considered as a core service until now.

On the bright side at least the failure was limited to just the boards. The
website, apps and check in desks all had the correct information.

[1] [https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3034002/too-many-
compan...](https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3034002/too-many-companies-
are-cloud-junkies-says-gatwick-airport-cio)

------
nimbius
reminds me of the waiting room at the auto repair shop I work at. As an engine
mechanic, its vital to make sure customers have access to up-to-the-minute
stats on their minivan (or so im told by my boss.) Eventually someone knocked
a stepladder into the screen and broke it, so we switched to whiteboard and
engine techs had to scribble in status updates in front of customers like some
sort of weird lecture.

Techs would mark down "NG" for no go, OK for ok, and HOLD...these all make
sense to us, but not to customers. Even worse, once an hour or two a tired
tech would shuffle into the waiting room study the board for a minute, and
slowly cross out the name of a _person_. The whiteboard worked, but that day
our shop was indistinguishable from a mafia den.

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planetjones
I struggle a little to see how there is a single point of failure here (a
fibre optic cable). I’d have thought the screens were powered by a device
plugged into a LAN. Would be interested if anyone knows the architecture of
such screens and why there is such a single point of failure in the whole
airport.

~~~
Someone1234
These screens build information from multiple sources inc. airlines, ground
control, and in some cases airport management. They're typically run off-site
at a data center since that provides high resiliency and some data is sourced
from outside the airport anyway.

If the airport has a dedicated fiber channel between their data center and
airport itself and it was damaged, this could be the result. The question I'd
ask is why they have no fallback strategies (e.g. cellular, VPN over a less
secure internet channel, etc).

This might be an area where they can explore graceful degradation, meaning
that gate information would continue to display (from airport ground control),
but some flight times might be missing.

~~~
MBCook
It seems so strange that they wouldn’t have a redundant link (like the various
options you suggested) or at least fall back to easily available public data
(flight information sites) that would at least help some.

~~~
lakisy
Some years ago, we lost access to our data center although it had triple
network redundancy. What happened was that three cables were leaving the DC
leased by three different companies. But a mile down the road, all three
different cable entered the same physical pipe. When the physical pipe was
severed, all three network cables went dark. We should wait until they
announced details of what happened before we decide that we know what happened
and offer solution ("If they only had redundant links")

~~~
lgeorget
If my memory serves, one requirement of high-tier datacenters is that they
have redundant electric lines leaving the building from opposite sides and in
opposite directions. I guess it must be the same for optic fibers.

I fully agree with you on your last sentence. One should wait for a bit more
than a vague declaration reported in a newspaper before giving unsolicited
advice.

~~~
mmt
> high-tier datacenters

How many people (even tech ops profesionals), these days, know how to tell the
difference? Of those that do, how many don't just keep their mouth shut
because their bosses don't want to hear it?

These details are just trusted to "the cloud", instead.

Of course, the airport itself isn't a datacenter of any tier, and that "last
mile" can be the biggest redundancy challenge, anyway.

------
duxup
Distantly related but when I was in Europe decades ago I was at a train
station where they had a massive split-flap display ( I want to say at a
couple places ). I loved watching it update.

Aesthetically it was so much better than big super bright screens.

~~~
cnorthwood
What you're looking for is called a Solari Board, there's some mesmerising
videos of them around, and a few places still have them!

~~~
jjjensen90
There's a company in the US that will make you one/rent you one, you can even
control it via API. They sound really cool too.. I think I need to expense one
for my office!

[https://www.oatfoundry.com/split-flap/](https://www.oatfoundry.com/split-
flap/)

~~~
duxup
Yeah if you have to contact them to get a price.... dang.

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huangc10
Yeh, whiteboard works but another more technical solution could be roll out a
TV stand and hook up the TV to a laptop via HDMI and update schedule live
through a shared doc (Google docs?). I mean, whatever works right...

~~~
kingbirdy
That requires them to have a surplus of portable TVs and laptops, which I
don't see why they'd have (and would be much more expensive to buy as backup
than the white boards)

~~~
mikepurvis
Also, the full-manual solution of having whiteboards on standby covers a much
broader spectrum of failures.

~~~
londons_explore
As well as a whiteboard on standby, you also need 1 person per whiteboard to
keep them updated. In an airport as big as gatwick, you probably can't get
away with anything less than ~10 whiteboards (5 per terminal). Which means 10
people.

Not many companies have 10 spare people on site ready to act as emergency
whiteboardmen.

~~~
mikepurvis
There are 21000 people employed at Gatwick airport. There are going to be a
lot more than ten people on standby at any given time, waiting to take on
exactly the kinds of surprise situations which are business as usual in a busy
airport.

------
the_mitsuhiko
If only London airports could print the gates on the tickets. But I guess they
would miss out on that sweet revenue from consumption.

~~~
ig1
At high-volume airports gates aren't assigned until the plane has arrived from
it's inbound flight which is often <1hr from departure time.

Checkin generally opens 24 hours prior to departure (some airlines now allow
>7 days prior) - hence for the vast majority of passengers the gate is
unavailable as ticket issuance time.

Most airports and airlines let you get gate information fro their
websites/apps as well though..

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
I have a flight i take somewhat regularly at Heathrow. I think I only once did
not find it at A20 and then it was around the corner.

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safgasCVS
So... massive IT failure and everything carried on working because staff was
really competent? Damn the Brits are hung up on complaining

------
kovek
Went volunteering at a speed skating event once. One task I was asked to help
with was mark the order of the skaters at the end of the race. I asked why
that is and they explained that if all systems fail (1. Device on the skater's
ankle, 2. cameras recording the race), then this ordering we note is what they
will fall back on.

It seems like a lot of work people do is individual and idle when other
systems take responsibility of many issues in a process. I'm glad that people
worked closer together as a result of this failure!

I'm glad people worked closer together here, not that there was a failure!

------
awiesenhofer
After Deutsche Bahn was hit by wannacry Last year they too uses blackbords and
announcers like in the old days. It was beautiful to watch.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/13/cyber-attack-
hit...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/13/cyber-attack-hits-german-
train-stations-hackers-target-deutsche/)

------
dfsegoat
Great example of "Improvise. Adapt. Overcome." in a bad situation - whether
they had SOPs for this situation or not.

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freyr
If I worked at Gatwick Airport, all my practice at whiteboards would finally
be relevant to my job.

------
cyberferret
Hmmm... The flight boards for most of the airports around me here in Australia
are available via the internet, on a public URL. [0]

Wonder why someone didn't just prop up PC's with large monitors or projectors
around the airport, hooked into the WiFi to broadcast this info?

[0] -
[https://www.darwinairport.com.au/departures](https://www.darwinairport.com.au/departures)

------
octosphere
Imagine having to update the whiteboard in real time though? Must be a right
PITA, unless there is minimal changes going on with the flights (lack of
delays or gate changes).

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researcher_
Talk about mvp :)

------
Farstrider
Simplest solution to the problem, love it

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PacifyFish
Whiteboard interviews vindicated. /s

~~~
bitwize
Yes, even as ops grind to a dead halt, the company can still screen candidates
looking for reasons/excuses not to hire them.

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retSava
My first thought was that the whiteboards themselves failed, that this was
some kind of The Onion article, but it isn't.

It's simply that the backup plan to the failing digital boards, are plain
whiteboards.

~~~
ams6110
Same. That is a really poorly worded headline.

~~~
tantalor
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-
path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)

~~~
dmurray
This is the opposite of a garden path sentence: the first verb really is part
of the sentence's main clause - i.e. the meaning of the sentence is
"Whiteboards [are] used..." instead of "Whiteboards...fail".

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illwrks
Have people forgotten they can use mobile apps?

~~~
bhandziuk
Not everyone has a phone. Not everyone has that app (whatever it is... the
airport, the airline, the travel agency), using an app is always harder than
looking at the real-time displays especially if your hands are full of
luggage.

~~~
tjohns
And on top of that, not everyone's phone will be charged, and not everyone
will have cell service (if traveling internationally).

The mobile apps are great when they work, but still need to be considered a
convenience rather than a primary information source.

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olafure
Whiteboards are remarkable.

