A good follow-up message to the recent air traffic control outage in the LA Center was recently posted to the Interesting People mailing list.
Basically, the system needs to be reset about once a month- or more specifically, once every 30 days or so. I heard a rumor that part of the problem in LA was that they’d done the reset at the beginning of August, but had put it off for September… and were planning to do it at the end of the month.
There’s a RISK right there; “once a month” probably means “once every 30 or so days”, not “once in a calendar month” which could leave an interval as long as nearly 60 days in between resets.
The author is a controller in the Seattle center. For a good view of the politics of FAA technology, read his full post here.