The Federal Aviation Administration is reviewing a proposal submitted on Thursday by IBM Corp to save its endangered contract for en route air traffic control workstations. IBM says that the workstations are based on RS/6000 stations and servers, and that all the problems are in the software. The Administration is threatening to withhold payments and even cancel the $3,900m contract to modernise the US air traffic control system if IBM does not fix the problems quickly. The move is seen as a move to get IBM working on the case rather than a serious threat: rivals say they haven’t been approached to propose alternatives. The problem has delayed the second phase by 18 months.
