SAN FRANCISCO — Bay Area Rapid Transit engineers are conducting “a comprehensive forensic evaluation” to determine what caused a shutdown of the BART system on Saturday.
The Saturday morning outage began about 6 a.m.; service was not fully restored until about 11 a.m., the San Francisco Chronicle reports. BART’s preliminary report is that the closure was because of a computer network failure affecting the power and routing systems. It was the first such significant system outage in 15 years, a member of the BART board told the Chronicle.
BART’s statement on the outage said the evaluation “is expected to take several days due to the complexities of our system.”
BART is outdated and overwhelmed, 40+ years old; yet it still, somehow, manages to provide mostly reliable transportation around the Bay Area. They have begun a major project to upgrade all aspects of the system but it has to be done while keeping the system operating.
Mr. Landey: I don’t question the realibility of the Max but outsiders who are able to hack into sophisticated computer systems anywhere on our planet today and override them. Perhaps a remote possibility but could this have been the cause of some of the crashes in recent history? True, this is my opinion and sheer speculation on my part, but I’d appreciate your professional comments on this subject just the same. Other bloggers welcome too of course. Thanks to all of you!
JOSEPH
The thing about the 737 – MAX is that there are so many of them. When two or three Lockheed Electras or two Douglas DC-10’s went down, that was significant and led to inquiries, because it was two or three in a small fleet. There are so many 737’s, including the MAX models, that anything can happen anywhere. It may be a defect in the planes’ software (as you speculate with the word ” …. perhaps?”) or it may be some other factor(s) or it may be just a bad roll of the dice.
Southwest generally doesn’t use the MAX on the routes I fly. Even if they did I’d fly it. Southwest has killed a total of two people in its entire existence (one passenger, one on the ground), so I think they know what they’re doing. If there’s a problem handling the plane, their pilots would report it.
Mr. Rittle: Good point. Witness the Boeing 737 Max 8…perhaps?
Item: The Boeing 737 Max demo color scheme reminds me somewhat of the onetime EMD scheme that graced several models including my favorite, the SD45!
Southwest pilots on the 737 MAX: “Jonathan Weaks, the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, says the union is “extremely confident” that the 737 MAX is safe. He says he’s being in discussions with the airline and other unions.
Here’s part of his statement:
“I have been in numerous conversations today with Southwest Vice President of Flight Operations Captain Alan Kasher, who informed me that the MAX aircraft has 17,000 recordable parameters and Southwest has compiled and analyzed a tremendous amount of data from more than 41,000 flights operated by the 34 MAX aircraft on property, and the data supports Southwest’s continued confidence in the airworthiness and safety of the MAX.” “
Incomplete testing of the numerous software changes which are continuously introduced into complex systems probably cause a lot more problems than hackers.
In our ultra modern high tech Century 21 computer age expect these shutdowns to continue. They can hit anywhere anytime without warning. Or could it be that hackers had something to do with it?