Why 40-Year-Old Tech Is Still Running America’s Air Traffic Control

ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2014, a telecommunications contractor named Brian Howard woke early and headed to Chicago Center, an air traffic control hub in Aurora, Illinois, where he had worked for eight years. He had decided to get stoned and kill himself, and as his final gesture he planned to take a chunk of the US air traffic control system with him.

Court records say Howard entered Chicago Center at 5:06 am and went to the basement, where he set a fire in the electronics bay, sliced cables beneath the floor, and cut his own throat. Paramedics saved Howard's life, but Chicago Center, which controls air traffic above 10,000 feet for 91,000 square miles of the Midwest, went dark. Airlines canceled 6,600 flights; air traffic was interrupted for 17 days. Howard had wanted to cause trouble, but he hadn't anticipated a disruption of this magnitude. He had posted a message to Facebook saying that the sabotage “should not take a large toll on the air space as all comms should be switched to the alt location.” It's not clear what alt location Howard was talking about, because there wasn't one. Howard had worked at the center for nearly a decade, and even he didn't know that.

At any given time, around 7,000 aircraft are flying over the United States. For the past 40 years, the same computer system has controlled all that high-altitude traffic—a relic of the 1970s known as Host. The core system predates the advent of the Global Positioning System, so Host uses point-to-point, ground-based radar. Every day, thousands of travelers switch their GPS-enabled smartphones to airplane mode while their flights are guided by technology that predates the Speak & Spell. If you're reading this at 30,000 feet, relax—Host is still safe, in terms of getting planes from point A to point B. But it's unbelievably inefficient.

More details here.