The academic world survives and advances on many different activities, among these is travel to conferences. The earliest 'real' warning academics will get about Y2K that will be listened to is: Sorry you can't fly to that conference because we cannot get you insurance cover. Any one know of early warning from insurance people? My travel agent says prior booking begins 33 weeks before Y2K. That will be May 1999 or there abouts. Any other early indicators from the air travel industry?

-- Bob Barbour (r.barbour@waikato.ac.nz), July 13, 1998

Answers

I understand that (so far) Lufthansa and another airline have decided not to fly for the first weeks of 2000 - just to ascertain the safety of "business as usual". My husband and I had made plans to spend New Year's Eve in Paris that year. We've decided that that won't be happening. I have heard even the most conservative individuals on the Y2K issue express great reservations about flying in the first weeks of 2000.

-- Chana (chana@campos.org), July 13, 1998.

Several Underwriters at Lloyd's of London July 1998 warned their clients that they will not be covered for damages caused by the millennium bug, unless they can prove that they took all possible steps to guard against it. In June all the Lloyd's aviation syndicates wrote to the airlines they insure to warn them that millennium bug claims will be excluded from policies. A recent Associated Press report said that while the airline industry promises planes won't fall out of the sky, "radar and air traffic control glitches could make it unsafe to fly over some nations." A survey of 113 countries by the U.S. State Department found that telecommunications companies in 33 of them were having problems with year 2000 fixes and that 29 others were unaware of or had not begun to address the problem. Bob Barbour's question is pertinent. Two questions: 1. Provided major airlines get their act together, what about partner/feeder airlines some of which may be in remoter areas of the world? 2. An airline's hardware and software may be bug-proofed. What happens when the power and telecommunications links crash?

-- Neville Clarke (nevilleclarke@airwise.com), July 13, 1998.