Rebooting Bid After Air Traffic Control Meltdown

This week saw yet more chaos from UK airspace shut down. Third time in three years. All seemingly caused by 'flight processing' issues.

This latest calamity, directly affecting 2,100 flights over two days, reportedly caused by a local military aircraft inputting 'spurious' flight data.

Eerily similar to previous incidents. Where unexpected, malformatted or bogus flight plans send the system haywire.

Exacerbated by the age of said system itself, supposedly stuck in senility.

It took four hours to potentially fix the glitch. Knock-ons thundered throughout the week for around 330,000 passengers.

I shuddered from the memory of a deal at least a generation-and-a-half back.

We were pitching a new way of getting hitherto hidden gold out of Enterprise silos.

All going well. With the then usual arrogance of bigger players on manoeuvres. Claiming either they could do it now or was in their imminent product update.

No such 'fact' applied.

Then our main prospect-side backer rang panicked.

Some random influence, neither client nor supplier, had breezed through and mentioned in passing they thought our hot new approach was just hot air.

This was utter nonsense. Slander to boot. High stakes too, as I was the 'disruptor' so such talk certainly could leave me stranded in the departure lounge.

My immediate reaction was to call it out. But I knew we must tread carefully.

I went with a two-pronged action.

Our supporter-in-chief went off to hunt down the military aircraft and establish direct their flight data.

Whilst I went pitching the pre-emptive patch of validation. Let's work together and we show you how it all works, with your own data.

Hardly radical, but solid.

Turned out, despite us catastrophising the alternatives, there was a case of mistaken identity. Then our next prepped demo nailed it.

Know that we have our own such edge-case data. Beyond such tangential offhand comment, the not uncommon competitor whisper or internal rumour can also threaten to derail our deal before the facts are checked. We can plan to stop these making our 'system' buckle.

Track down that source. Challenge untruths. Seek controlled validation in client space. Only then decide whether further moves required.

Then like me back in the day, your new client shall never befall the fate of an out-of-pocket traveller let alone suffer their trip-of-a-lifetime in ruins.