Why you won't fly on 1/1/00

I attended a talk by a Y2K consultant (Bruce Webster), and what he had to say was pretty interesting. Most of "our" (ie classic) computers are pretty much invulnerable to the bug, but they aren't invulnerable to lawyers. When asked if planes would fall out of the sky on 1/1/00 his answer? "Of course not, there won't be any passenger planes FLYING on 1/1/00." His reasoning is as follows: 1) Everyone has "known" about the Y2K issue with computers "forever". 2) If a plane _were_ to fall out of the sky and it _was_ due to a Y2K problem, the liability would be huge. 3) The insurance carriers for the airlines have already issued notice to the airlines that they won't provide liability coverage for Y2K problems. 4) The airline lawyers will not allow an airplane to fly if it doesn't have liability coverage. 5) No airline will fly a passenger plane. QED. So, they are faced with the choice, cancel one day of flights or face potentially catastrophic losses. For what? One day of revenue? No way! They will fly cargo and if none of them fall out of the sky then they will resume passenger services on the second. However, as the "Y2K" designee for FreeGate I've had the opportunity to go through the process for certification and its pretty interesting in the sense that you have to ask a lot of questions like, "If I find a bug in the firmware of my T1 communication card that I have to fix immediately, is my node-locked cross compiler product going to work 1/1/00 and beyond so that I can actually compile the fix and deliver it?" Now the embedded processor doesn't care at all what time or date it is, but the license for the development environment sure does! (my answer is I don't care, I'll leave the date on my development machine turned back if that is a problem, even though it is "forbidden" by the license agreement...) My take on it is that there will be unpredictable "events" that occur as a result of computers interacting with the date, however we, as a planet, are so massively interlinked these days it will be impossible to know why these things happen. I'm keeping a "millenium journal" for my kids (and presumably grandkids) that I am writing my observations in about the approach, and presumably passage of, the 1/1/00 date. --Chuck