A mental model is resuscitated

Power Failure at Atlanta Airport Snarls Air Traffic Nationwide by Taylor Barnes and Jacey Fortin. Pretty straight forward reporting of the incident.

A power failure at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Sunday disrupted operations at the busiest airport in the world, forcing the cancellation of more than 1,150 departing or arriving flights and stranding travelers on planes on the tarmac for hours, the authorities and passengers said.

The power failure at the airport, a major hub for domestic and international flights, sent a ripple of disruptions across the country, affecting flights in Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. There were signs the problems would linger into Monday, as Delta Air Lines announced Sunday evening that it planned to cancel 300 flights the next day.

Many flights in the air were diverted when the power went out, and the United States Customs and Border Protection said on Twitter that international flights destined for Atlanta were rerouted to other airports.

Georgia Power, the utility provider for the airport, said early Sunday evening that the failure, which occurred around 1 p.m., might have been caused by a fire that damaged an underground electrical facility and cut power to a substation serving the airport. It also damaged a backup system that provides power to the airport in emergencies.

Utility workers restored power to all terminals at the airport by midnight, the city said. The airport is the busiest in the world for passenger traffic, serving more than 104 million passengers last year, according to Airports Council International. The failure affected at least 30,000 people, airport officials said.

So the New York Times can do unembellished reporting. That's what we want more of.

The next account is less "just the facts ma'am". From Atlanta Airport Blackout Sends Message to Terrorists: America Is Unprepared by Clive Irving.

I actually read Irving's account first and it leapt out to me because Irving focuses on a theme that is common in some circles, the need for America to harden it's infrastructure against terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

I have recently been compiling a list of mental models that assist people in interrogating phenomena and issues. One of the candidate mental models that I came across was "redundancy" from engineering, logistics and similar fields. In considering its inclusion in the superset, I had two simultaneous but contradictory thoughts. It is a powerful idea from one field that does have useful application in other fields but at the same time, my sense is that it is not as frequently discussed as in years past. Checking Google Trends, that impression seems correct with only about a third as many mentions in 2017 as there were in 2004.

My suspicion is that the TQM movement, Six-Sigma, and their near relative Business Process Reengineering from the 1980s and 1990s were so successful in attaining their goal of reliably high performance that they have muted awareness of the need for redundancy. When everything has redundancy built in from the beginning, you are less aware of the concept than when it is being retrofitted as we used to have to do.

And redundancy is the anchor around which Irving's reporting revolves rather than the NYT's reporting of the facts.

Irving's account is more excitable, less cautious, and more informed by a particular perspective than is the NYT's.

If a terrorist wanted to find the most vulnerable point in America’s airport network they could not have hoped for a better guide than what just happened at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson.

Just after 1 p.m. Sunday the whole airport, the world’s busiest, went dark. Thousands of flights were disrupted. For many hours nobody in authority attempted to explain—or even seemed able to explain—what had happened.

As chaos spreads nobody knows who turn to for information. The communications blackout is as complete as the power blackout.

Given this situation a small band of suicide bombers could roam freely and commit mayhem and massacre on an unprecedented scale.

Initial responses as the story broke were that the holiday season travel would be disrupted for days. That is true. The ripple effect of the paralyzed airport will be worldwide as thousands of international connections are canceled.

In the United States it will probably take a week to get schedules back in service. As scores of airplanes sat on the runway or at gates frozen for lack of power the aircrews ran out of their allowable time on duty.

But, while perhaps less reliable, he has more of a point and it is exactly the concept of redundancy.

But forget about the harm done to Christmas travel. It’s much more serious than that. There has never been a single-point failure of this magnitude in any major airport in the U.S. All the essential systems seem to have lacked backup—or, in the language of the bureaucrats, redundancy.

Normally around 275,000 passengers, equal to the population of a small city, pass through Atlanta’s airport every day. From the moment when this disaster hit that flow continued without restraint, with the terminals quickly becoming jammed. Nobody in the airport management stepped up to stop that happening.

This is not the first time that this airport has been hit by a power failure that caused chaos. In August 2016 the operations center for Delta Air Lines, for whom Atlanta is its major hub, lost power causing the airline’s computer system to crash. More than 2,000 flights were canceled over several days.

[snip]

But of course this does not explain the glaring problem that has surprised and shocked national security experts: Why could a failure at one power source automatically knock out the supply to a whole airport? Why were there no backup systems to keep the essential services at the airport functioning? Why were there no emergency generators ready to cut in as they are, for example, at hospitals? Why was there no power for the most basic systems, not even lighting for the terminals, leaving passengers and airport staff in the dark at gates and security checkpoints?

The Atlanta chaos is yet another red flag indicating that our airports are far from ready to deal with a terrorist threat.

It remains to be seen whether the utility infrastructure fire at a single point source was indeed the cause. Irving perhaps got out ahead of the facts.

These contrasting accounts illustrate one of our epistemic challenges. We do want straight reporting of the facts. We also want informed speculation about important strategic issues.

We need someone like the NYT to be a purveyor of straight reporting. We do need more fringe sources like Daily Beast who might not have the resources for the on-the-ground straight reporting but do have the contextual knowledge to connect the dots. And we do need to be able to discern where straight reporting ends, informed contextual knowledge begins, and where rank spinning and selection with the purpose of advocacy is dominant. There can be a lot of grey lines between those domains.

It is not easy to be well and accurately informed.