The EU± Schengen Area is playing a big game of schedule chicken right now. The announced date for the start of the repeatedly delayed Entry/Exit System is November 10, which is very soon, but no one will officially comment whether it's actually going to happen or not, and leaks say some countries aren't ready.
It will require everyone entering to have a biometric scan and will probably explode the lines, which are already excessively slow in some places.
Airlines like Icelandair sell tickets with sub-hour connections in KEF for flights from the US to Europe. It's hard to imagine that they'll manage to run a whole new onboarding process in the little bit of margin those connections have.
If someone hits a fiber in middle of nowhere Croatia and takes out the border station's internet, do you shut down the border? Or does every land/sea/air passport control have a local copy of the entire database and store and forward updates? Or a sat modem?
"Schedule chicken" is a common aerospace industry term, where you have a schedule and two or more teams working toward it. Every team knows they aren't going to make the schedule, but none will say anything until eventually one is forced and can be blamed for the delay.
Common for the hardware and software team on a rocket to be playing schedule chicken. Or a big payload and a new launch vehicle.
It's named after the "game" of two people driving straight at each other until one chickens out.
Ben Brockert
Lars
Tim Lloyd
Brandon Haber