When the digital departures and arrivals boards went down at London’s Gatwick Airport, airport staff when old school—with an emphasis on school.
The airport set up whiteboards to direct passengers to their gates because sometimes low tech is the best solution to high-tech problems. As innovative as digital boards are, there’s no such thing as accidentally cutting the fiber optic cable to a whiteboard, which is apparently what happened to the display boards at the U.K.’s second busiest airport. Airport officials tweeted Monday that they are working to fix the problem.
While we have nothing against whiteboards, there are reasons to love a good digital departure board—namely, you don’t have to try and decipher someone’s bad handwriting while running for a plane.
Due to damage to a Vodafone fibre optic cable, we are continuing to display our flight info manually. Contingencies are working – we have whiteboards and friendly staff on hand to help, and tens of thousands of passengers have departed on time. Apologies for any inconvenience.
— London Gatwick LGW (@Gatwick_Airport) August 20, 2018
It's a whiteout at Gatwick Airport as digital signs stop work and a white board is used for passenger information https://t.co/DBunsmZVu9 @Gatwick_Airport @Sign7TV @SignLinkEditor @signlink #MondayMotivation #MondayBlogs pic.twitter.com/yFX89Aidqw
— SignLink (@signlink) August 20, 2018
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