I was among the lucky in Southwest Airlines' fiasco. My trip came just at the end of it, and I arrived in Portland Ore just under an hour late. The airports were still full of long lines of exhausted travelers, patiently or angrily waiting to find a way home, or on. It seems the computer failure was compounded by the weather– my departure was threatened with delay, but then the storm dissipated and the crew was able to make up for lost time and arrive as scheduled. (Applause...)
But this failure– and a concurrent apparent breach at a major software company whom I can't name, that required the employees to delete all their files and protocols in a big hurry– brings up a big question. How is it possible that a computer failure or a breach, at any level, can affect the entire system, in these cases, nationwide? How can a company have such an interdependant operating system, with no way to manually override, to isolate the affected area? And what about our power grid? There have been efforts to upgrade the infrastructure to prevent the spread of outages, but a strategic breach, or even a natural disaster would still wreak widespread havoc.
Designing a new model of interconnection should be an overriding priority– and to get that to happen, recovering our organs of government from the grasp of those who are not able to recognize the insanity of developing nationwide service industries, all of whom are just as “too big to fail” as the banks, on a last-century economic model and with minimal oversight. Just saying.
A concurrent thought for deeper consideration, too, is that those of us who have the means are used to being, and expect to be, able to jet off to wherever we would like to go, often planning either business or leisure around the assumed availability of on-time, reliable air travel. But as we flew through this absolutely amazing space between two layers of clouds with activity I was grateful not to be closer to (the photo does not at all do it justice), I couldn't help thinking that with the increased frequency and intensity of storms and weather systems, we need to rethink our travel habits and expectations. Not to mention special events such as volcano blows!
Does it make sense to have such a high volume of travel at one's disposition, just because one earns or otherwise can spend a certain amount of money? Yes, modern plane travel may be less carbon-heavy than the equivalent in individual travel, but the overall volume of moving around that we do generates huge amounts of pollution, not just in fuel but in all the wastefulness of our airports, with their mountains of throw-away food and packaging, etc.– and on and on, train stations, even our everyday driving. And yet, how could we rethink our lives without resorting to hamfisted and impossible-to-enforce regulation? Any ideas? I'm sure there are plenty out there– how can we get that conversation on the agenda?