minstrelmike writes: Over the weekend, hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled in the Washington, D.C. area after air traffic systems malfunctioned. Now, the FAA says the problem was related to a recent software upgrade at a local radar facility. The software had been upgraded to display customized windows of reference data that were supposed to disappear once deleted. Unfortunately, the systems ended up running out of memory. The FAA’s report is vague about whether it was operator error or software error: “… as controllers adjusted their unique settings, those changes remained in memory until the storage limit was filled.” Wonder what programming language they used? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
