Windows 3.1 threat to climate meeting

A COMPUTER glitch that grounded flights at two Paris airports has been traced to air traffic control software that has not been updated since 1992.

An aviation engineering expert has told Le Canard Enchainé that such a glitch could reoccur during the UN Conference on Climate Change which is due to take place in the capital on November 30 to December 11.

After the discovery of a glitch in the DECOR system which communicates weather information to pilots and runs on Windows 3.1 there will not be enough time to overhaul the system ahead of the conference, when hundreds of world leaders are expected to arrive.

On November 7 a software fault prevented air traffic controllers at Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports from relaying information about visual distances to pilots as fog began to settle.

Flights were grounded for half an hour before being progressively restored.

"The tools used by Aéroports de Paris controllers run on four different operating systems, that are all between 10 and 20 years old," said the secretary general of France's UNSA-IESSA air traffic controller union Alexandre Fiacre.

Mr Fiacre said that finding spare parts for the ageing machines was becoming increasingly difficult, as was employing staff who understood how they worked.

France's transport minister told Le Canard Enchaîné that "equipment will be upgraded by 2017."

France is not the only country facing this problem.

In December 2014, a software failure closed the skies over London for more than half an hour and last August a computer glitch resulted in diversions and delays for hundreds of flights and the closure of skies above north-east America.