Event-Driven Architecture: How SOA Enables the Real-Time Enterprise

Chapter 7Case Study: Airline Flight Control

In the classic movie, Airplane, the director of the airport orders his men to “dump all the lights you have on the runway” as an ailing plane prepares to make an emergency landing. In the next shot, a large dump truck unloads hundreds of table lamps, sending them crashing to the runway pavement. Though surely not produced with EDA in mind (who asked Shirley, anyway?), this scene illustrates one of the great vulnerabilities of airline flight control. Though airline flight control involves a lot of complex, logistical matters, it relies to a great degree on human-to-human voice communication or dead-ended and circumscribed views of disconnected information systems.

Of course, much of the system ...