Why you won't fly on 1/1/00

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_freegate.com>
Date: Mon Jan 4 18:37:59 1999

I attended a talk by a Y2K consultant (Bruce Webster), and what he had to
say was pretty interesting. Most of "our" (ie classic) computers are pretty
much invulnerable to the bug, but they aren't invulnerable to lawyers. When
asked if planes would fall out of the sky on 1/1/00 his answer? "Of course
not, there won't be any passenger planes FLYING on 1/1/00." His reasoning
is as follows:

1) Everyone has "known" about the Y2K issue with computers "forever".
2) If a plane _were_ to fall out of the sky and it _was_ due to a
   Y2K problem, the liability would be huge.
3) The insurance carriers for the airlines have already issued notice
   to the airlines that they won't provide liability coverage for Y2K
   problems.
4) The airline lawyers will not allow an airplane to fly if it doesn't
   have liability coverage.
5) No airline will fly a passenger plane. QED.

So, they are faced with the choice, cancel one day of flights or face
potentially catastrophic losses. For what? One day of revenue? No way! They
will fly cargo and if none of them fall out of the sky then they will
resume passenger services on the second.

However, as the "Y2K" designee for FreeGate I've had the opportunity to go
through the process for certification and its pretty interesting in the
sense that you have to ask a lot of questions like, "If I find a bug in the
firmware of my T1 communication card that I have to fix immediately, is my
node-locked cross compiler product going to work 1/1/00 and beyond so that
I can actually compile the fix and deliver it?" Now the embedded processor
doesn't care at all what time or date it is, but the license for the
development environment sure does! (my answer is I don't care, I'll leave
the date on my development machine turned back if that is a problem, even
though it is "forbidden" by the license agreement...)

My take on it is that there will be unpredictable "events" that occur as a
result of computers interacting with the date, however we, as a planet, are
so massively interlinked these days it will be impossible to know why these
things happen. I'm keeping a "millenium journal" for my kids (and
presumably grandkids) that I am writing my observations in about the
approach, and presumably passage of, the 1/1/00 date.

--Chuck
Received on Mon Jan 04 1999 - 18:37:59 GMT