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The Department of Transportation is far behind, warns the Office of Management and Budget.
This is from THE GUARDIAN (Jan. 15).
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In its December report, OMB expressed particular concern about the Transportation Department, with particularly “poor progress” by the Federal Aviation Administration, responsible for the safety of the flying public.
As of mid-November, the Transportation Department had not completed the assessment phase for a number of its mission critical systems, including the FAA’s air traffic control systems. The FAA itself has completed assessments on only 38 per cent of its systems while identifying an additional 245 systems as mission critical. . . .
If the US has major concerns about its air traffic management systems, the problems are likely to be even greater overseas, which could be a dampener on global business activity.
“Even if the airline industry announces that most flights will depart as scheduled, the public’s concerns about safety could lead to significant cancellations of reservations, especially to Christmas 1999 vacation destinations. Air freight, package and mail delivery services could also be seriously disrupted and impaired,” said Ed Yardeni, chief economist with Deutsche Morgan Grenfell.
The FAA has found no quick solutions. In November, the agency faced a time and date software problem that threatened to bring down one of its air traffic management systems. It was forced to manually sift through more than a million lines of code after software tools failed to find everything that needed fixing.
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