Air travel test run passes Y2K challenge

Unknown to the travelling public, the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) has been conducting simulations of the effect on its computer systems of the Year 2000 date changeover.

For one week in each of the months of December and January, Shannon and Dublin airports respectively forwarded their operating systems to December 31st, 1999, and rolled over into 2000 "without a glitch".

"You've probably already flown in the year 2000," Mr Michael Twohig, of the Irish Aviation Authority, told a conference in Dublin yesterday. Though air travellers were not informed of the test run, Mr Twohig said it was conducted with the highest possible approval within the industry.

He was speaking at "Y2K - Moving Towards Zero", a seminar sponsored by the The Irish Times and Ennis Information Age town. The guest speaker at the conference, Y2K pioneer, Mr Peter de Jager, was a little less optimistic about the air traffic situation in other countries.

He said little had been done in South America, Russia and Japan, to address the Y2K problem. He added that there was also cause for concern in France - which at one point deemed the millennium bug problem an "Anglo-Saxon conspiracy" - and Germany, which has put most of its recent focus into preparations for the euro. He said: "The Y2K problem is the dumbest situation we have ever created for ourselves. It is even more stupid than hauling a huge wooden horse into the city of Troy, and then discovering there were hundreds of soldiers inside."

However, the Year 2000 specialist contended that the back had been broken on the Millennium bug problem globally and said scenarios depicting power outages and telecommunications breakdowns would be unlikely. Instead, there are more likely to be "hundreds of thousands of computer related problems" over the next year. Mr de Jager said Ireland's Y2K preparations had advanced considerably since his previous visit two years ago. He would now rank Ireland behind the US and Canada in terms of preparedness for the millennium changeover but he warned that there is cause for concern among smaller and medium sized enterprises.

This sentiment was echoed by the Minister of State for Science, Technology and Commerce, Mr Treacy, who provided the opening address. "Small and medium sized companies, especially the very small ones, may not be sufficiently aware of the extent of the potential difficulties and adverse affects which the Year 2000 computer problem poses to their businesses. The county and city enterprise boards are ideally placed to get them involved immediately," Mr Treacy said.

Telecom Eireann's 25 million Y2K project is scheduled to be complete by June of this year, according to Mr David Murray, head of the project. He added that there was extra pressure on the company to be completely prepared in advance of its stock market flotation - scheduled for the third quarter of this year.

He said all of Telecom Eireann's business systems had been deemed compliant since mid-November, and in the event of problems during the changeover, every component of the network has some form of independent power supply, either via batteries or mobile generators.

Mr de Jager said nuclear missiles were not going to accidentally explode during the Y2K changeover because they only detonate following a chain of commands. If one command fails then the process will not be put in train.

The "Y2K - Moving Towards Zero" seminar moves on to Ennis Information Age Town tomorrow evening. The venue is the West County Hotel at 6.30 p.m. For further details contact Gerard Sweeney PR: telephone 065-684-1300.