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    The Aviation Advocacy Blog

    A cornucopia of news, opinion, views, facts and quirky bits that need to be talked about. Join our community and join in the conversation on all matters aviation. The blog includes our weekly round-up of the bits of European aviation you may otherwise have missed – That Was The Week That Was

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Fire in Chicago – what it shows is that Europe cannot cope

What do we learn from the fire in the ATM facility in Aurora, near Chicago? There is no doubting the impact on the traffic and the disruption. So once again we can show that ATM is important, and perennially under-appreciated but what a way to do it. There might be three things we can take from the incident. First, this was not a ‘terrorist attack’ it was a trusted contractor. What can we do to stop the disgruntled? Perhaps the real answer is to build resilience into the system to be able to react and respond as well as possible when the unimaginable becomes the reality. Secondly, the resilience issue has to be thought through. It is not just having a complete second set, but rather the ability to switch and to address contingencies. With infinite money we could have an infinite amount of spare kit, but that way madness lies. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the work the controllers and the FAA generally did to patch things, to rearrange sectors and airspace to allow other centres to take over was both fantastic and completely impossible in Europe. What a badge of shame.

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