A wave of activity to try to defuse the "millennium bomb" is coming, a leading company said at the show.
And there are warnings from information technology (IT) experts based in Britain about problems faced by the aerospace industry trying to tackle the date change problem.
The problem (also called Y2K), which could hit everything from microprocessors to networks, centres on the fact that in 2000 computers will not able to distinguish between the 20th and 21st centuries.
It's because "legacy" systems have been programmed with dates expressed in two digits. So 2000 will appear as 00 and nobody is sure how IT systems will react.
The result is the biggest challenge in the history of the technological world - almost every organisation on earth trying to deal with the same problems simultaneously.
"Pretty soon, we are going to see the 'startled hare syndrome' as everyone wakes up to this," says Al Munson, senior vice-president Group Executive Information Systems at Litton.
"I think there are lots of people out there who are hoping against hope that the problem will go away and that someone will come along with an instant solution. It's not going to happen," he says.
Litton has set up a group to tackle the problem for customers. Munson says it's most serious in the banking and finance sectors, less so in the aerospace industry.
However, British experts are warning of potential problems in areas such as air traffic control and planned maintenance systems.
Says Robin Guernier, executive director of the British Government's Taskforce 2000 which is trying to raise awareness on the issue: "People are confident that they can sort out the issues in the UK. We might be fine in Europe, but what of the developing world?
"But the microprocessor is so widespread and the world is so interconnected that this problem is a global one."
One IT consultant associated with Taskforce 2000 called for global organisations to set standards for Y2K compliance. "Somebody needs to come down and say: 'this and this must be done', particularly in areas like aerospace where there are safety critical systems.
"There needs to be a common mechanism, to which we can all relate, for establishing and publishing compliance status."
Source: Flight Daily News
