US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut (reuters.com)

>A man stranded in the bush in northern Saskatchewan was rescued last week after chopping down four power poles — knocking out electricity to surrounding communities. [...]

>But he had an axe and he knew SaskPower would have to check the downed line, so he went to work.

A lot of people are incompetent.

I am paying, $1000, $1800 & $1900 for the same service at 3 different location (20 mins from each other).

Two locations, I also have old coax lines that are still active, but not paying for it.

When I bought two businesses, I learned that they were paying for a dedicated fiber but using coax service.

At one of the location, we had fiber, and paying for backup coax and wireless. But if you turn off fiber box, it wont fail over to either one.

I wouldn't surprise it was down for weeks and no one bothered about it.

Not saying that's what is going on here, just that it's possible.

Nothing I've ever seen or experienced with FAA indicates a lack of care; the parsimonious explanation is almost always that people who care a great deal are working within complex systems that don't always have a consistent or externally legible set of priorities. Or more intuitively, the failures we see are the "acceptable" ones versus the unacceptable ones (like planes falling out of the sky).

BT guy ends that part of the presentation with "the IRA will really have to get shit together to take you off the net"

This was during the troubles. Same planet, different world.

Good luck to all of us.

The fundamental problem with DCA, and one of the two main causes of the crash [1], is that they are required by political pressure to operate at a higher operational tempo than they can safely operate at. DCA has essentially 1½ usable runaways--large planes can only use the larger runway, and given the capacity restrictions, airlines have been pushing to use fewer small planes at the airport. This shift in plane size means the effective safe slot capacity has gone down, but people still keep citing the same number as justification for safe numbers, and the politicization of the issue has shut down everyone who complained that the actual traffic just couldn't be safely handled.

If DCA's theoretical slot capacity (36 landings and takeoffs each per hour) is to be reached one just one runway, you have about 100 seconds to go from plane 1 touchdown; exit the runway, letting plane 2 on to take off; plane 2's wheel leaving the runway, clearing plane 3 touchdown. That's doable, but with essentially 0 margin for error. Alternating the runways used for each landing would give you closer to 30s of margin, but if only 10-20% of the planes can use the alternate runway, you can't divert enough planes to use the alternate runway.

Now DCA and the FAA aren't stupid enough to actually schedule 36 landing slots every hour, but the problem is that because of a few various factors, what was scheduled as, say, 30 slots for an hour (giving 120 seconds between landings, probably sufficient margin) ends up being 12 slots used in the first half-hour and 18 slots used in the second half-hour, which means a lot of the actual operation ends up having no safety margin even though on paper you have sufficient margin.

One of the ways you can rectify that is to assign slots further in advance so that you don't get the bunching. Effectively saying "oh, if you leave right now, you'll arrive at 3:30 with three other planes, but if I hold you for 10 minutes, I can push you into a less busy arrival time." Doing this requires good, accurate prediction of the actual flight travel times, and my understanding is that this is what the new software is meant to provide.

[1] The other main cause is essentially that the DoD's aviation practices in the area is a giant clusterfuck that endangers lives, and unfortunately that sentence is not relegated to the past tense.

* There is supposed to be a primary and a secondary link, in this case the primary failed and the fail-over also failed. It's unclear from the reporting if they were damaged in the same incident or if the failover was not tested or monitored adequately.

The Philadelphia TRACON site has been notoriously unreliable and was supposedly improved in 2025, it's also unclear if these issue actually could stem from that implementation.

That seems like an extremely foolhardy thing to do.

And of course there are marker posts that say "buried fiber optic cable do not dig".

Before fiber a lot of things were put into the ground with no thought how you would find it again.

With low-enough engineering quality, you don't actually need saboteurs.