Case Study: grounding of US flights due to file system failure Domestic flights across the US were temporarily grounded on Wednesday 11th Jan, after an IT failure in a critical aviation safety system. The Federal Aviation Administration said that its Notice to Air Missions system (NOTAM), had failed and was not processing new information. First called a 'glitch', the error in the NOTAM system, which alerts pilots of potential hazards along a flight route, grounded more than 13,400 flights on Wednesday, with more than 2,300 cancelled entirely. The incident caused the first nationwide grounding of all departing aircraft since the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001. The Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) confirmed there was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious intent behind the most recent outage. The system, which dates to the middle of the last century, gives pilots real-time updates on flight conditions. According to the FAA's website, NOTAM communicates "information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations, but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means". A NOTAM includes "abnormal" information about the status of airspace. Alerts can convey a range of details including time, airport, location and descriptions of a hazard, obstruction or service. According to an FAA advisory, the NOTAM failed Tuesday night, at 8:28 p.m. Eastern Time. Its failure prevented new or amended notices from being sent to pilots. The FAA resorted to a telephone hotline to keep departures flying overnight, but as daytime traffic picked up it overwhelmed the telephone backup system. Someone "unintentionally deleting files" led to the problem. Just before the outage engineers were working to correct a synchronisation issue between the live primary pilot messaging database and a back-up version of the database. A news report claims that "the same file corrupted both the main system and its backup," adding that the FAA continues to investigate the problem and prevent it from happening again. The system was quickly restored after the outage, but the knock-on effect has been felt across the industry, with over 13,000 flights delayed or cancelled due to the malfunction. While the NOTAM network has undergone several revamps over the decades, the operating system running NOTAM is over 30 years old. A system upgrade is still around six years away, with many calling for this timeline to be pushed forward urgently. A source told the media, "The core operating system for the database has been around since the 1990s. Regardless of the improvements made to the system in recent years, it still has the heart of an 89-year-old man." Airline executives blamed a lack of funding for the FAA on the outage, saying it was due to it not having the resources and staffing needed to operate properly. Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian said during an interview that "hopefully this will be the call to our political leaders in Washington that we need to do better".

Build a set of scenarios for the future of the IT systems described in the case study. You should use one of the two main methods for scenario planning (Davis' three-stage method and the key uncertainties method).

You should produce:

(a) a focus (clearly described, in a short paragraph) and timescales for the scenarios;

(b) a set of driving forces using the STEEPLE categories;

(c) if you are using the Davis method, a set of around seven short scenarios; if you are using the key uncertainties method, the two key variables (including a brief description of each variable) and the names of four scenarios, to fill the quadrants of the matrix;

(d) a more developed set of descriptions of the key scenarios - three or four in the case of the Davis method, all four if using the key uncertainties method.