Well what can you expect if you try to keep the planes in the sky in the 1990s with a complex of IBM 360/65s and 360/50s? Believe it or don’t, but one of the engineers whose thankless task is to look after the aged IBM 9020D air traffic control computer at West Drayton is something of a hero in dowsing circles: it’s becoming increasingly hard to track failures in the much-patched circuit boards in the 360s, and some of the engineers have taken to trying their skills with the magic stick to locate failures – and one engineer using a divining rod has been beating the test equipment to the sites of faults.
