"US Flights grounded because a single mistake by a person not trying to do anything wrong".<p>The question should be: why is a single error by a good faith actor able to take out flights across the US? What prevents a malicious actor grounding flights in the US given this obviously fragile mechanism?
I'm curious what those "rules" were mentioned in another post[0] that were suspected of being circumvented.<p>Yet another story[1] says:<p>> Had the FAA’s new NOTAM system been in place, redundancies would likely have stopped the cascading failures. With the antiquated system in place, there was nothing to stop the outages, the official told ABC News.<p>> "Now we have to understand how this could have happened in the first place. Why the usual redundancies that would stop it from being that disrupted, did not stop it from being disrupted this time, and what the original source of the errors or the corrupted files would have been," he said.<p>So there were multiple failures that allowed this to happen. Redundancies if not routinely tested aren't failsafe. It's possible that this particular failure mode wouldn't have been caught even if redundancies were working as designed.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381219#34381857" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381219#34381857</a><p>[1] <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/computer-failure-faa-impact-flights-nationwide/story?id=96358202" rel="nofollow">https://abcnews.go.com/US/computer-failure-faa-impact-flight...</a>