I AM REMINDED BY THIS PARTICULAR NEWS ...

[Michael Grove]

of the reference made by myself to this tragic accident, in a post

from Albert Klamt, around the time of his own post about the

control of complex systems. May the victims of this event and their

extended families, as well as ALL of those involved with the complex

aftermath of this consequence of the consequences of complex

systems rest in the peace of understanding the need for ACTION. 

The CBS NEWS article opens with this ... 

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - In the mid-1950s, air travel was a shadow of the highly advanced operation of checks and rules seen today. The skies were largely uncontrolled, and pilots outside major U.S. cities relied on sight to avoid catastrophes. Then, two commercial airplanes crashed over the Grand Canyon in June 1956, killing all 128 people aboard in the deadliest aviation disaster of the time and helping spur an overhaul to flight safety. A country already grappling with increasingly busy skies pressured Congress for major changes to improve air traffic control and radar systems and to create a federal agency to regulate it.

"It really did underscore for the general public, for the first time, that much of the air space in America was uncontrolled at that time," said Peter Goelz, former managing director for the National Transportation Safety Board. "Once you got up to 20,000 feet and beyond the terminal radars, it was see and be seen."

Grand Canyon National Park will mark the designation of the crash site Tuesday as a National Historic Landmark in a ceremony overlooking the gorge on the east end where the wreckage was scattered over 1.5 square miles. Some of the victim's remains never were identified, and most of those that were have been buried together in mass at cemeteries at the Grand Canyon and the northern Arizona city of Flagstaff.

 

 

.

[Michael Grove]

[IT] IS therefore very gratifying to have [BE]come aware of the fact that

THE most important products in development for NextGen Air Traffic

Management System are the definitional tools and documents that

explain what the system is, what its capabilities are, and how they all fit

together. Having these kinds of planning tools is essential for an

initiative of this of scope. With that in mind, the JPDO is working with

all of its government partners and t he private sector in developing the...
 
Operations Concept & the Enterprise Architecture.

The Concept of Operations explains how the system will work and what

it will look like. This is important in developing the structure, policy,

procedures, and the changes in the function that will be needed to

make the system a reality. The Enterprise Architecture is much like a

set of blue- prints. It defines the key capabilities of NextGen, how

they fit together, the timing of their implementation, and how they

affect the various members of the aviation community.

[Michael Grove]

The Crash that Changed the Way we Fly; the story of the 1956 Grand Canyon mid-air collision that revealed that there was no en-route Air Traffic Control in place only Flight Information which was sparse if available at all.

This tragedy acted as the catalyst for major changes in the way commercial flying in the USA was conducted from the perspective of Safety First, Expedition Second, in the context of the fact that a Flight Information Controller Controls NOTHING. It led to the activation of an Air Traffic Control System which required that all flights above 18,000 ft be on an IFR flight plan and separated from each other, by way of Procedural or Radar Control.

[Michael Grove]

Since the beginning in the 1950s, when people like Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Kenneth Boulding developed the field of ‘General Systems Theory’ and Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson and others developed the field of ‘Cybernetics’, and Jay Forrester developed ‘systems dynamics’ there have been many attempts to break free from the reductionist paradigm and develop a more holistic and systemic understanding of the complexity of the world we live in.

Early systems thinkers were still ultimately aiming to improve their ability to better predict and control the system in question. The introduction of insights from chaos theory and non-liner mathematics into systems science sparked the development of complexity theory.

Interconnectedness, unpredictability, and uncontrolability are key characteristics of all complex dynamic systems. In dealing with complexity rather than mechanisms, the aim of science shifts from improving our ability to predict and control to aiming to better understand the dynamics and relationships of the systems we participate in so that our participation can be more appropriate.

By Daniel Christian Wahl, originally published by P2P Foundation Blog

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-09-12/a-brief-history-of-sy...