May 25, at gate awaiting boarding for MSP to CDG flight. Monitor at Gate G4 providing helpful information. Yeah, sure.
It was not 27°F but 27°C; in fact, Paris broke its all-time high for May by reaching 33°C or 91.4°F. Numerous upsets at the French Open were attributed to the excessive heat as ranked players became exhausted later in the match.
So the question remains What happened? A few ideas:
- Code changes to either the display or API calls that flipped the two temperatures;
- Incomplete or non-existent testing that would have identified the error;
- A technologist unaware of Celsius/Fahrenheit differences;
- Manual process that uses low-paid interns to copy temperatures from The Weather Channel into the template from which the gate display is generated
One’s initial inclination is to assume Delta automated this process years ago, yet the error is so egregious that it pass even a casual glance: Fahrenheit readings are numerically greater than Celsius above -40°, the temperature which is equal in both scales. Therefore, I’m left with a manual process that is error-prone and problematic. Very disappointing.
