Airlines can’t do anything about the weather, but when their computer systems fail and flights are canceled, that’s another matter.
Recurring system breakdowns in the past couple of years have caused tens of thousands of canceled, delayed and missed flights. Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines have made the news for the wrong reasons during that period.
Delta was the latest to experience a systems failure. The airline canceled about 280 flights just a week ago as a result of failure of Delta’s “essential IT systems.”
At John Glenn Columbus International Airport, flights to and from cities such as New York and Detroit were up to four hours late starting around 6:30 p.m. last Sunday. The last flight from Delta’s Atlanta hub to Columbus on Sunday night was canceled, as was the first flight to Atlanta on Monday morning.
“Sigh – long journey to Germany just (got) longer tonight with @Delta system-wide computer outage grounding of all flights. Sitting on tarmac CMH,” tweeted Columbus resident Tom Thompson, who goes by the handle @thepaintmaker on Twitter, about 7:30 p.m. last Sunday.
Thompson said in a follow-up message on Monday that he “gave up after 3 hours and went home at 11 pm … rebooked today” when it became clear he was going to miss his connection in Atlanta.
“This is the single biggest quality-of-service issue facing the industry,” said Joseph Schwieterman, a former airline executive who now is a professor at DePaul University’s School of Public Service.
“There’s been an enormous amount of publicity about it, and Congress has made it clear that it’s not going to let this die” if the airlines don’t fix the problems, Schwieterman said.
“The hard part is, there doesn’t seem to be one single reason,” he said. “But there has to be a way for there to not be a complete shutdown if something goes down.”
George Hobica, founder of website AirfareWatchdog.com, said aging computer systems and insufficient investment by the airlines to keep them updated is a big part of the problem.
“Some of the airlines are still running IBM mainframes and using software that was written in COBOL,” Hobica said, citing technology that is the tech equivalent of writing with a quill on parchment.
“They’re cobbling together legacy systems and more modern systems, and in many cases probably not paying enough to attract and retain IT people, who could get much more generous pay and benefits at a Google or other tech company.”
After Delta’s August meltdown, CEO Ed Bastian said in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Delta’s infrastructure was “dated,” but that newly hired tech executives were working on “the next level of investment.” He added that about $1 billion a year already was being spent on technology.
Southwest also has vowed to put more money into its technology systems, though it has not said how much.
“We have several strategic initiatives underway to modernize and/or replace many of our current systems, including our new reservations system, which goes fully online for domestic and international travel in May,” spokesman Brian Parrish said in a statement last week.
Although the industry seems to have plenty of internal technical issues to address, some people think that the airlines might be facing problems not of their making – think attempted hacks – more often than they let on.
“So many hacks happen every day and don’t get reported unless something gets stolen,” said Joe Danyi, owner of Youngstown Computer in Youngstown, which works on systems and security for businesses.
“For every one you hear about, there’s probably 100 you don’t hear about. It’s a cat-and-mouse game trying to combat it.”
The reasons matter little to those who have been caught up in the resulting travel disruptions. Hobica doesn’t have much patience for airlines’ excuses.
“Other types of big companies aren’t experiencing the same thing. Facebook , Twitter, Airbnb … they aren’t having these mass outages for hours at a time.”
Meanwhile, travelers should try to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Missed flights mean financial and public-relations headaches for the airlines, but they’re often an even bigger deal for passengers.
“How many hundreds of millions of dollars have (airlines’) customers lost?” Hobica said. “The funerals not attended, the weddings missed. This is something they need to fix.”
[Source:-The Columbus Despatch]