Re: Copenhagen Air Traffic Control System

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1991Jun24.134926.11913@sctc.com> stachour@sctc.com (Paul Stachour) writes:
>mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
>
>>them. The bottom line is: if you're scared of Ada, don't fly into Europe in 
>>a few years.

>  When I was in Germany, I attended a "German Ada Expo" in Jnauary,
>1990.  An individual who had participated in building the the
>Koberhagen ATC was there.  At that point, it had been running for
>six months, and (according to him) there had been NO outages or
>major erorrs traced to the Ada software.

I hope it was clear that my "bottom line" was sarcastic. I find myself 
wondering how the Europeans managed to develop a working, installed ATC
system in Ada while the FAA system just drags along. The European airports
seem progressively to be adopting versions of the Thomson system. Taken as
a whole, European air traffic is not signficantly less voluminous than
American traffic - Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt are _very_
busy places, and they'd all fit into the American East. 

A recent posting expressed concern that the FAA system will never be
completed. What's holding it up? Maybe we should just adopt the European
system (if it were politically possible, which I'm sure it's not).
Can anybody enlighten us here? Where are we going wrong?

Mike

PS - speaking of transportation, I caught a snippet last week at WAdaS
that the French high-speed rail network (otherwise known as TGV) is
using a bunch of Ada these days. Can anyone confirm or refute?