A faulty network interface card (NIC) was blamed for a radar system meltdown last week at the Dublin Airport. Because of the unexplained system failures on displays showing codes identifying incoming aircraft, air traffic controllers manually shut down the display. This resulted in days of travel chaos in which tens of thousands of passengers were left stranded or delayed. The company that developed the hardware for the air traffic management, Thales ATM, was brought in to carry out a technical examination of the system. An Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) spokeswoman noted that the entire problem stemmed from "an intermittent malfunctioning network card which subsequently overcame the built-in system redundancy." Have you ever experienced system issues that were later traced to malfunctioning NICs before?
To read up more on this airport radar malfunction:
- check out this Irish Examiner article [1]
Links:
[1] http://www.examiner.ie/breaking/index.aspx?c=ireland&jp=mhqlaukfcwid