A total of 194 workstations connected by 60,000 meters of cable are gathering dust in a vast office complex in the Hampshire, UK countryside – evidence of a botched IT project. Their screens were designed to monitor the crowded skies in a $562m project to modernize the current en-route air traffic control system for England and Wales. The new air traffic control center for the UK at Swanwick, described on its web site at http://nerc.nats.caa.gov.uk/swanwick.htm, was due to be operational in 1996. A vast lakeside building was completed on time and technicians were on target with the installation of a $221m system put together by big names such as IBM, EDS, Siemens, Logical and Frequentis. But no aircraft received instructions from controllers monitoring their progress on 20 inch Sony screens. The software was not ready in time. This is a familiar story for everyone in the industry. But the 2.3 million lines of code resident on Swanwick’s fault-tolerant servers have a history. For a start, its core has been around for a long time. Its first incarnation was as an ambitious project in the US for the Federal Aviation Authority – which eventually abandoned the system. IBM then used it as the basis for the successful bid it made to provide the software at Swanwick in the early 1990s. But the project passed from its hands when IBM Corp’s Federal Systems Division was acquired by Loral Corp in 1994. The software engineers found they had yet another boss two years later when the division was sold onto Lockheed Martin in 1996 (CI No 2,825). Under each owner, the fixed price contract has become more of a burden and industry sources suggest that this one project alone has run up losses of $160m. The last major problem came when it was installed at Swanwick and the Lockheed Martin team found that what worked fine in the test labs was stricken when put into operational use. It simply didn’t scale up. By April this year, they were confident they had overcome the problem and it was handed over to National Air Traffic Services NATS for final testing. Optimistic noises were made that the huge task of training the 600 air traffic controllers could begin this year in readiness for the new center to begin operations in 1999. All this optimism was swept away last week when Transport Minister John Reid told MPs that NATS opening date was wildly optimistic and said they had seriously under-estimated the scale of the task in opening Swanwick. NATS says there are still a few bugs in the system and Swanwick will only go into operational service when they are confident that it is safe to do so. A new opening date of the end of 2001 to the beginning of 2001 has now been fixed. Three years does seem a long time to sort out a few bugs. And those involved in the project suggest that so much time has passed that the present system is already outdated and NATS officials have compiled a wish list of improvements they would like to see. Either way, Lockheed Martin engineers will have to return to the 2.4 million lines of code, written in Ada. They await a report due out in the next two weeks by the Defense Engineering Research Association, which will evaluate the software at Swanwick. Meanwhile NATS, which has been working hard to ensure its existing system is year 2000 compliant, will conduct the crucial tests later this month. It will switch the clocks on its mainframes to December 31, 1999 to see what will happen to the system when the millennium dawns. For several years at least, while engineers curse over all those lines of code at Swanwick, the safety of those flying in and out of England will depend on those old mainframes and their ancient but usable software.
