Assuming the GDP is lost completely and not at least partially made up by increasing number of flights on other days.

All of the AI money discussions have broken me for being surprised by large amounts of money. The frontier companies spend that in what, 5 minutes?

That makes sense, and yet...

If things blow up because you're upgrading to something supposedly better and it goes wrong, then that's not a time when you can properly fix the new thing. You can only push forward with the transition or go back to the old. I disagree with "you've got nearly a blank check to do whatever's necessary to make sure it never happens again." You have a blank check, but anything you use it for has to be scoped within stopping the bleeding. As soon as you're onto the new or back to the old, the check expires and you likely can't touch anything real anymore because it'll be involved in lawsuits and finger-pointing.

I don't disagree with the core message, but I think it plays out differently for a major upgrade vs a production meltdown on an existing system. With mostly an existing system, you can pour effort into resilience. With an upgrade, I doubt people would let you beef up a system that is still on the chopping block, even if it's getting a life extension. And if you're still switching to the new system, all effort is going to go into getting it up and running and anything that gets in the way of that (as quality improvements are likely to) is going to face some serious resistance. The check is not truly blank.

Funnily enough this also works at a personal level, as in, within yourself.

You can spend years working on a problem but if you have a catastrophic failure in your personal life, you can use that to change dramatically with far less internal resistance.

> working to modernize US ATC since ~2003

I was working on upgrading US ATC in 1995. As were lots and lots of other people.

> The wonder is that it still mostly works.

A lot of very hardworking people getting too little pay for something so critical while their employers (some contracting company) take a lot of profit. Eventually they burn out waiting for help and a replacement system and retire or quit, then the systems really start failing because the knowledge leaves with them.