Human Error Causes System Glitches That Embarrass New Asian Airports

The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1998

WAYNE ARNOLD

Garbage in, garbage out.

One of the oldest rules of computer programming, this simple postulate -- that a machine is only as good as the humans using it -- explains much of the chaos experienced at Asia's two new high-tech airports, according to the people in charge of the mess.

At Hong Kong's $20 billion Chek Lap Kok airport, erroneous information typed into a central database triggered a domino effect that sent the new facility into almost comic confusion: flights taking off without luggage, airport officials tracking flights with plastic pieces on a magnetic board, and airlines calling confused ground staff on cellular phones to say where even more confused passengers could find their planes. Similar scenes were played out at Malaysia's $2.2 billion Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where stranded cargo translated quickly in the tropical heat into rotting refuse.

These problems appear to be separate from those afflicting Hong Kong's largest air-cargo operator, Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd. Its US$1 billion SuperTerminal 1 is linked to airlines, freight forwarders, customers and shippers by another computer network. But a bug in Hong Kong Air's system caused computers to erase inventory records, according to a spokeswoman. That and problems with computer-controlled equipment, airport sources say, have put Hong Kong's largest cargo handler temporarily out of business, curtailing the city's supply of fresh meat and produce and prompting fears that the economy might suffer.

Other Airports' Problems

Other airports, of course, have stumbled over systems intended to make them run more smoothly -- Denver, Kansai in central Japan and Munich, Germany, are all renowned for their rough takeoffs. What sets Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur apart is the extent to which they both try to orchestrate the many moving objects at an airport -- from passengers and suitcases to jets and refueling trucks -- by connecting them over a network to a central computer brain.

Technicians say they have managed to weed out most of the bugs. But the embarrassing electronic bedlam has already raised questions about whether political timing took precedence over a need for more staff training and why the systems weren't smart enough to ignore dumb input. More than anything, the trouble thus far demonstrates a modern corollary to the original programming truism: that as more and more of daily life is entrusted to computer networks, it takes just a little bit of garbage in to get a whole heap of garbage out.

Kuala Lumpur's airport, aside from a tropical arboretum and the world's tallest control tower, boasts a 700-million-ringgit ($167 million) "total airport management system."

Twenty different contractors built systems for 20 different airport operations, from flight information to baggage handling, and plugged them all into one system with 434 miles of fiber-optic cable and the networking know-how of Harris Corp. of the U.S. and Sapura Holding Sdn. Bhd. of Malaysia. The contractors trained airport and airline personnel, and trials indicated the operations could function independently if the system went down. "There's nothing wrong with the system," says Umar Bustamam, head of the system at Malaysia Airports Bhd.

Mistakes and Panic

But on opening day, Mr. Umar says, check-in agents typing incorrect commands into the unfamiliar new system panicked when they couldn't produce boarding passes. Their natural, human response: Press more wrong keys. It didn't take long, says Mr. Umar, for such actions to overload the system, paralyzing it. Flights were delayed by hours as boarding passes were filled out by pen and relief crews were called in to tote bags from the tarmac to baggage carriers.

Hong Kong's 552 million-Hong-Kong-dollar (US$71 million) system was also supposed to be a marvel of modern networking. Germany's Siemens AG, Dutch company VanDerLande, and Hong Kong's Swire Engineering built a baggage-handling system capable of shuffling almost 20,000 bags an hour to planes and luggage carousels, preparing detailed records all the while. Honeywell Inc. of the U.S. provided a building-management system so intelligent it can assign jets to gates based on how cheaply it can keep the area heated or cooled. These, the air-traffic control system, and a variety of other systems are all linked to a central airport operational database from California-based Oracle Corp., which lets each system know immediately of changes in another. Serving as the interface between the database, the airlines and the 35 million passengers a year the airport expects is the flight information display system, known as FIDS, built by Electronic Data Systems of the U.S. for system contractor GEC (Hong Kong) Ltd.

Fits From FIDS

Last week at Chek Lap Kok, FIDS was causing fits. According to spokesmen for EDS and the Airport Authority, someone, somewhere entered incorrect data, such as a gate or flight arrival time, into the central database, and FIDS then did precisely what it was designed to do -- spread that new information as fast as possible to all points. Just who and what information is still unclear. Perry Rees, EDS's account director for airport systems, and the Airport Authority's head of information systems, Kiron Chatterjee, were unavailable for interviews, spokesmen said. But the resulting confusion, they said, was caused by humans, not a system gone haywire. "This is not HAL in "2001," " said Philip Bruce, public-relations manager for the airport.

Fed bogus information from FIDS, the system of Cathay Pacific Airways -- the airport's largest user -- was also rendered useless. Without accurate information about where and when its aircraft were arriving, the airline couldn't tell where to send cleaning crews, refueling trucks and, most vexing, baggage and passengers. The problem was aggravated by a breakdown in telecommunications links. Employees at an airport control center had to use their mobile phones to call ground crews with gate information.

Mr. Bruce says the airport conducted five trials of its system, the last one involving 10,000 people. But not every employee could get the chance to try out the new system, he says, since the old airport at Kai Tak had to be kept open until the night before Chek Lap Kok's opening. "In my opinion, there was adequate testing and trials run," says Darren Dargan, head of information technology at Cathay.

Nevertheless, investigators will doubtless be asking whether such a sophisticated system shouldn't have been able to recognize potentially incorrect data and double-check it, something Mr. Dargan says it should have been able to do. Mr. Bruce says the system can only be so smart, though. "If someone keys in the flight is coming at 11 and it's [actually] coming in at 12," he says, "that's not a system failure."

© The Wall Street Journal, 1998