Thousands of air travelers were stranded today, waiting for computerized air traffic control systems to come back online after malfunctions hit some of America’s busiest airports. Vancouver YVR airport has not been listed as affected yet but it is expected that the problems caused by hundreds of flight cancellations and delays will reverberate throughout the airline industry.  A software glitch is the likely suspect at this point, the second time in 15 months that a glitch has caused widespread problems. The last time the source of the computer software malfunction was a “packet switch” that “failed due to a database mismatch” according to the FAA. The air traffic gliches today had been fixed as of 10 am eastern time but passengers are still encouraged to check their flight status before coming to the airport.

Software problems have increasingly affected flights themselves too and some believe that the complex machines pilots are flying have become largely unfamiliar to them; the most common comment heard in the cockpit being “What’s it doing now?”. A recent article in the Times UK looks closely at the crash of Air France flight 447 and examines how the increasingly complex human-machine interface can suffer from disconnects between the extremely advanced computer systems and pilots themselves, many who have been at the controls for 20 years or more as the technology has rapidly changed around them.

The most common cause of plane crashes before computerized systems with protective redundancies was human error.  Now some worry that the increasing divide between computerized autopilot systems and the knowledge of their software and hardware that pilots posses should be of concern. And if human-machine interface issues aren’t enough now we have to worry about cosmic rays too apparently.  A recent Quantas flight that plunged twice just off the coast of Australia  may have been affected by cosmic rays (in particular neutrons in the rays) that interfered with the avionics boxes that feed information to the flight computers. A hundred people were injured in that accident but the plane landed safely and the problems it experienced were not associated with the same gliches related to the Air France tragedy, namely faulty air speed sensors.

I’m of the firm belief that as jet airliners become more and more complex that pilots need to be trained and retrained to catch up to the pace of software development and hardware upgrades that create disconnects between human and machine. All that being said, air flight is still considered the safest mode of transportation and several sites give extensive overviews of all safety advancements in aviation, debunking popular myths and reassuring the nervous flyer.

After all the money that has gone into hardware and software upgrades that bewilder pilots you’d think they’d have the budget to do something about that airline food.