Vista fails to take off with air traffic controllers
It’s not quite as embarrassing as getting the brush-off from Intel, but Microsoft has received another knock with the news that officials are barring air traffic controllers from taking their exams on Vista machines.
The Federal Aviation Authority decision affects contractors who carry out the tests, and means that they must use either XP or Windows 2000. Non-Microsoft operating systems including Mac OS, Unix and Linux variations are also barred.
It appears the software used to run the exams may be incompatible with Vista as the FAA hasn’t ruled out approving the system in the future.
However, there’s another factor in play which is pretty ludicrous: Information Week reports the FAA specifically states examiners can carry out tests on machines with just 128MB of memory, which clearly rules out Vista.
It’s understandable that the government wants to keep financial requirements low to attract contractors, but there’s surely something seriously wrong if the firms vetting air traffic controllers genuinely couldn’t afford to splash out on a RAM upgrade.
In some ways it’s surprising the FAA has mandated Microsoft products at all: Microsoft servers got some of the blame for a 2004 incident where controllers in Los Angeles lost all radio contact for three hours, leaving 800 planes stranded in the sky.
It turned out a flaw in the servers’ design meant they shut down automatically after 49.7 days. The FAA had been planning to fix the system for at least a year, but in the meantime ordered staff to manually reset it every 30 days. An inexperienced technician screwed one of these resets up, which led to the automatic shutdown, which unfortunately coincided with a failure in a back-up control system.
The FAA’s new policy will at least avoid any international confusion: Switzerland’s air traffic controllers communicate through a system named Voice Integrated Switches for Air Traffic Control – or VISTA for short.
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