>> A commercial pilot friend of mine was flying to NY on the night the
>> lights went out. The lights below just blinked out like a big cloud
>> suddenly arrived. The ATC voice disappeared mid sentence. And he
>> looked down at the panel just in time to see the VOR go to "off".
>
>
>I imagine the thought of nuclear war occurred to him for a moment or two.
>
>While working for NZ Telecom I was talking to our head office 450 odd miles
>away in Wellington city when connection via the internal phone system cut
>out. Dialled back - dead. Tried outside lines to Wellington - dead. Tried
>other Wellington numbers - dead. Turned out that we lost ALL comms to
>Wellington in one  hit - a most unusual event. Can't even recall why now
but
>the redundancy planners would have had some explaining to do.



Shades of what happened to the company I worked for in Auckland. The company
set up am 0800 number for fault calls, and had operators in Auckland to
handle these. The company also moved to a computer database fault logging
system which allowed the operator to assign the call to an engineer, and
then when the call log was completed, would page the engineer with details
of the call which would show on an alpha pager.

The problem was that the morning the system went live, a contractor dug up
the main telecom cable in the Bombay Hills, south of Auckland, which carried
the pager calls to the pager handling centre in Hamilton. Result was a very
quiet day for fault calls. :)

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