How to treat the paralysis and fragility of American aviation system?

Let's review things first: On April 1 day, 2065438, Southwest Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and JetBlue experienced system failures, which caused a large number of passengers to travel late. At present, there is no statistics on how many passengers are affected and when the system will be restored. The following figure is the FAA report on the accident.

In fact, not only the aviation system, but also the whole human industrial system itself is relatively fragile. For example, in 2003, the United States and Canada lost power. It is said that the blackout in the United States and Canada in 2003 was affected by this blackout, as shown below. The accident affected more than 50 million people. After more than ten days of power failure, 100 people died. The cause of the accident was also a software failure.

Simply put, modern industrial society is a cooperative society. Hundreds of millions of people work together through complex systems, and finally make this society work efficiently. But we know that the more sophisticated the instrument, the more sensitive it is to the external environment, and even a grain of dust can stop the whole machine. Therefore, once this complex social cooperation network has problems, it will often bring disastrous consequences.

These failures are sometimes software failures, sometimes human operation failures, and sometimes even some unpredictable astronomical phenomena, such as 1989 solar storm, which led to a large-scale power outage in Canada. In short, you cannot predict or imagine. This is the reason for the massive collapse of the aviation system. In a word, such a thing is inevitable in our era of rapid development, and it will inevitably happen with the development of science and technology.

However, we should not simply look at the status quo, but compare it with history. For example, let's see how passengers complain about this aviation system failure. The passenger complained, "I arrived at the airport at five o'clock in the morning and have been on the plane for an hour now." Due to system interruption, flights all over the country were grounded. I really hope this is an April Fool's joke. "

In fact, in other countries, it is not normal to delay the release for an hour or two, or 20 years ago. With the help of advanced dispatching system, the average delay time of airlines in many developed countries can now be controlled within a few minutes, as shown in the following figure. Therefore, because of the use of advanced technology, our life has become more convenient and our taste has become "awkward". Occasionally a fault can make people uncomfortable.

In addition, modern industry has realized its own vulnerability and started to pay attention to "robustness", which means that industrial departments are required not to put eggs in one basket, to have backup plans or backup equipment in case of emergency, to avoid the expansion of accidents to the greatest extent, and to have relevant plans at airports, so that passengers can leave eventually, or passengers can choose other modes of travel, which will not cause further disastrous consequences.

Therefore, it is completely wrong to say that high technology is not good because of one or two accidents. How to improve the stability of industrial system and prepare more emergency plans is what everyone should do.