Heathrow Shutdown Exposes Dangers of a Single Point of Failure
BloombergEvery engineer knows that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. That’s why so much effort goes into avoiding so-called single points of failure – system components whose collapse can bring down the entire system — because engineers know that, sooner or later, those critical elements will crash. London’s Heathrow is providing a real-life lesson of what happens when Murphy’s Law collides with a single point of failure: utter chaos. By Friday morning, the airport — Europe’s busiest, and the world’s fourth most active travel hub — had shut down completely for the day, the UK’s worst air travel disruption in years. The airline industry is already fuming: “ How is it that critical infrastructure—of national and global importance—is totally dependent on a single power source without an alternative,” asked Willie Walsh, the head of the airlines association and, before that, the boss of national flag carrier British Airways.
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