Lufthansa Y2K Test Flight Lands Safely

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Lufthansa Y2K Test Flight Lands Safely

Updated 7:57 AM ET October 29, 1999

By Melanie Cheary

FRANKFURT, Germany (Reuters) - German airline Lufthansa Friday successfully completed its first passenger flight to prove it is millennium compliant.

With its onboard clocks wound forward to simulate the date change to January 1, 2000, Lufthansa Flight 8852 landed safely at Frankfurt airport with 100 journalists on board after a trouble-free one-hour circular flight.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are now flying into the new millennium," said Captain Jens Olthoff as the clock in his cabin struck midnight and hostesses uncorked bottles of champagne.

"I wish you a year of calm and safety," said Olthoff, who heads Lufthansa's Year 2000 operations team.

The millennium bug or Y2K glitch occurs because many older computers -- which allocated only two digits for the year in a date -- may read 2000 as 1900, causing computer systems to make mistakes or shut down.

The bug has raised the specter of airplanes crashing out of the sky along with other technology horror scenarios.

The flight was designed to show that Lufthansa, like many of the world's airlines, has spent millions of marks (dollars) making systems Y2K-compliant and does not expect any major problems because of the century change.

Lufthansa has already carried out numerous tests with its own personnel but this was the first time it took passengers on board such a flight.

Olthoff said that while the airline was confident all potential problems had been addressed, Lufthansa did have a back-up procedure on board the Airbus machine in the event of an system failure. Olthoff's colleague Stefan Lane-Huelsenberg, who piloted the flight, said he had flown one test flight before and admitted to having been tense on that occasion.

"There's always something that you might have forgotten," he said.

======================================== End

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), October 29, 1999

Answers

A "back-up procedure"?

What was it, a group of park rangers on the ground?

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), October 29, 1999.


let's hope htis example is representative of thier whole air fleet rahter than justone test craft...otherwise it's just propaganda... thumbs up.. cautiously

-- jeremiah (braponspdetroit@hotmail.com), October 29, 1999.



-- Capt. Manuel Control (flythefriendlyskies@wright.brothers), October 29, 1999.

For all practical purposes, it does appear to have landed "safely".




-- Have a nice day (assume.the@crash.position), October 29, 1999.

1) and I was afraid they'd wait until it was too late...

2) In my experience, Lufthansa has always been pretty on-the-ball with safety issues. It leads one to wonder how well other airlines are preparing...

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), October 29, 1999.



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