Staff At Gatwick Airport Use Whiteboards After Flight Information Screens Fail (bbc.com) 50
Staff at the Gatwick Airport in southeast England had to write flight information on whiteboards for most of the day due to a technical problem with its digital screens. The BBC reports: Vodafone provides the service, and said a damaged fibre cable had caused the information boards to stop working. In a statement at 17:00 BST, a Gatwick spokesman said the issue had been resolved and flight information was being displayed as normal. "Tens of thousands" of people departed on time and no flights were cancelled. Apologizing to customers, he added that the airport's "manual contingency plan," which included having extra staff on hand to help direct passengers, had worked well. The airport earlier said a "handful of people" had missed their flights due to the problems.
People Use Common Sense To Overcome Problem (Score:1)
Such ingenuity. I are amazed.
Many wow!
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Yeah, but its easy to impress AC.
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No so fast: the airport owes me royalties; I have a patent on it:
Correction [Re:People Use Common Sense To Ov] (Score:1)
Correction: "Not so fast..."
Modnays.
apocalypse may be boring (Score:4, Interesting)
its usual to imagine, (generally, as well as in fiction, movies, tv shows etc), civilization collapse and end of the world as we know it, in dark violent apocalyptic(as in actual book of revelation) terms.
in fact, real apocalypse may be rather boring slow decline, which has perhaps already started in west.
in fact, there are historians, who think a new dark age has already begun in west, with low literacy, almost complete absence of knowledge of fruits and values of their own culture, its history, and subsistence level superficial lives totally dependent on government or big corps, of big majority of western population.
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in fact, real apocalypse may be rather boring slow decline, which has perhaps already started in west.
Start prepping for the Mad Max future now.
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its usual to imagine, (generally, as well as in fiction, movies, tv shows etc), civilization collapse and end of the world as we know it, in dark violent apocalyptic(as in actual book of revelation) terms.
in fact, real apocalypse may be rather boring slow decline, which has perhaps already started in west.
in fact, there are historians, who think a new dark age has already begun in west, with low literacy, almost complete absence of knowledge of fruits and values of their own culture, its history, and subsistence level superficial lives totally dependent on government or big corps, of big majority of western population.
The first sign of this slow decline and its accompanying low literacy is failure to use correct capitalization, punctuation, and grammar.
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That's a good sign that the collapse has already begun.
At the university where I teach, the head of the "writing center," an institution that is supposed to help students write better papers, sent around an e-mail asking us all to be more considerate of students' "linguistic diversity" and the many different, equally worthy Englishes (and other languages) they bring to college. Apparently it is more important to value their linguistic diversity by allowing them to maintain provincial perspectives that they
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Meanwhile its a credit to Gatwick to have a functional contingency plan that works.
Discredit to Vodafone for lack of redundancy.
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I may be optimistic, but I believe some other civilizaiton will rise to the challenge. There's more to current earth than the west and america.
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Low literacy? It is hard to find data for "the west" because it is so high it is not statistically meaningful. The world in general is at 86% and improving.
If we use the education index of the HDI, which is based on the number of expected years of schooling, we see an upward trend everywhere in the world, including the west. The HDI itself, which also includes life expectancy and GNI per capita as proxies for health and wealth respectively is also improving.
In fact, if you look at all the stats related to h
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Rocket-ships to Venus will be the solution.
In the UK, there are what are called "sink estates" where no-one has worked for generations. They live off benefits, and start families in their teen years. The fathers usually die off due to drug addiction or alcoholism.
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In reality most developed countries have never had such high levels of education. It fluctuates a bit due to funding, but unsurprisingly we have got better at teaching, not worse.
Knowledge of fruits may have been replaced by knowledge of information technology. Since we have finally got to a point where our food supplies are pretty secure and there are enough people retaining that knowledge to help us out in an emergency, that seems like a sensible change to make.
Anyway you can just google fruit now.
In other news (Score:1)
In other news the battery to my cellphone died the other day and to contact a friend I had to drive around to his house and knock on the door! Amazingly this worked!
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Amazingly this worked!
This solution will only work temporarily. Once people get used to the sound of door knocking, they will no longer need to come out to investigate what that strange noise is, and it will become a low priority notification, only to be responded to if there are no higher priority cat videos pending in the YouTube notification feed.
And 3 by 5 cards to check everyone onboard (Score:2)
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Speaking of flying "back in the day" just reminds me of how you could take your kids to the cockpit. There's some pic of me when I was 4 years old meeting the pilots and getting the wings stickers from them in the cockpit.
No more of that these days.
Or... (Score:3)
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In a lot of places that isn't possible, roaming data rates are such that you pretty much "live without" until you can find free WiFi around (because paid WiFi is still a thing).
Your solution is great if you're in the EU and all that, not so much if you're from places w
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Maybe its server is broken too. :P
Seriously? (Score:3)
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Are you mad? Redundant fibres? That doubles the chance of something getting pulled up by a backhoe.
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Because who needs redundancy in an Airport information system... the data isn't important enough to justify the cost! /s
As a resident in the South of England allow me to part two pieces of advice regarding travel.
1. Don't fly Iberia.
2. Don't fly to Gatwick.
1. because you want you luggage to arrive with you and 2 because you want to find which carousel your luggage went to.
Londong Gatwick is one of the worst run airports I've been to with massive queues for immigration. So much so that your flight will be taken off the board long before you actually get to the baggage claim area. This is odd because it's only a few
Boy-Scout Motto: Be Prepared (Score:1)
Every organization should keep a book of paper forms and tracking sheets to mass photocopy in case of a big systems crash. When you update a given book, rotate the older version to a different site so you have a spare if the first location gets whacked by disaster.
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Airports that are not busy have the luxury of pre-allocating gates days or even weeks in advance. When I've flown out of Heathrow, usually they will have allocated the gate by check-in time if the incoming flight was on time, but if they are still trying to figure out when the incoming flight is going to be needing the gate, they may not have allocated it yet. On short distance flights that have a quick turnaround, this is probably going to happen more frequently, mostly I've taken long haul from Heathro
LOL, fallback (Score:2)
Fallback system (Score:1)
At least they had a fallback system / contingency plan, that seemed to have worked. That makes Gatwick do better than approximately (my approximation) 80% of airports in cases like that.
Whiteboard and accessory (Score:2)
The whiteboard eraser is the little-known backup media, and can store what was written, in a highly compressed format. It is the best kept secret of all.