How much actually went wrong here? Forgive me, genuine question.
Afaict from my armchair as a computer scientist, at least some level of operational safeguards worked to cover what I guess is an edge case (multiple controllers racing against each other allowing multiple planes onto / crossing a runway at the same time)? One of them saw traffic on the runway and then proceeded to make a 6 minute detour instead of blindly hitting it. Maybe this is still safe enough and is worth it vs having everything be slower the rest of the time forcing all the controllers to wrap commands in a semaphore or mutex, so to speak.
Afaict from my armchair as a computer scientist, at least some level of operational safeguards worked to cover what I guess is an edge case (multiple controllers racing against each other allowing multiple planes onto / crossing a runway at the same time)? One of them saw traffic on the runway and then proceeded to make a 6 minute detour instead of blindly hitting it. Maybe this is still safe enough and is worth it vs having everything be slower the rest of the time forcing all the controllers to wrap commands in a semaphore or mutex, so to speak.