Whiteboards used after Gatwick flight information screens fail

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.

This was a failure of a fibre connection to the internet and a cloud service.<p>Oddly enough, Gatwick&#x27;s CIO was last week [1] telling journalists that he didn&#x27;t like to rely on the cloud:<p>&quot;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&#x27;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&#x27;t have that. Our operations are too important to us, so we need to keep it close. We use cloud for resilience, and we&#x27;re very pro-cloud, but not for core services.&quot;<p>So it seems odd that departure boards were being fed from a cloud service. Maybe they hadn&#x27;t been considered as a core service until now.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computing.co.uk&#x2F;ctg&#x2F;news&#x2F;3034002&#x2F;too-many-companies-are-cloud-junkies-says-gatwick-airport-cio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computing.co.uk&#x2F;ctg&#x2F;news&#x2F;3034002&#x2F;too-many-compan...</a>

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.<p>Techs would mark down &quot;NG&quot; 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 <i>person</i>. The whiteboard worked, but that day our shop was indistinguishable from a mafia den.

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.

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

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...

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

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

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&#x27;s ankle, 2. cameras recording the race), then this ordering we note is what they will fall back on.<p>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&#x27;m glad that people worked closer together as a result of this failure!<p>I&#x27;m glad people worked closer together here, not that there was a failure!

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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;cyber-attack-hits-german-train-stations-hackers-target-deutsche&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;cyber-attack-hit...</a>

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

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

Hmmm... The flight boards for most of the airports around me here in Australia are available via the internet, on a public URL. [0]<p>Wonder why someone didn&#x27;t just prop up PC&#x27;s with large monitors or projectors around the airport, hooked into the WiFi to broadcast this info?<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darwinairport.com.au&#x2F;departures" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darwinairport.com.au&#x2F;departures</a>

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).

Talk about mvp :)

Simplest solution to the problem, love it

Whiteboard interviews vindicated. &#x2F;s

My first thought was that the whiteboards themselves failed, that this was some kind of The Onion article, but it isn&#x27;t.<p>It&#x27;s simply that the backup plan to the failing digital boards, are plain whiteboards.

Have people forgotten they can use mobile apps?

Whiteboards are remarkable.