What’s up with all these airline computer shutdowns?

By George Hobica

Airfarewatchdog.com (TNS)

We’ve seen it too many times in the past few years. Airline computer systems shut down, leaving passengers stranded for days, resulting in massive revenue hits, ruined vacations and lost productivity. What’s behind this?

OLD TECHNOLOGY

American’s SABRE airfare booking system (now a separate company) was first tested in 1960 and ran the airline’s reservation system beginning in 1964, running on IBM mainframes. Ever watch an airline ticket agent work a computer? It’s all keystrokes and green-glowing CRT terminals. No mice here, no touch screens. Delta is “running on a reservation system that is more than 35 years old. In fact, it once belonged to an airline that went out of business in 1982,” aviation analyst Henry Harteveldt explained to CBS News.

MERGERS

When US Air bought America West, United acquired Continental, Delta merged with Northwest, Southwest hitched up with Airtran, and American purchased US Air, it created a complicated mishmash of software and hardware. So maybe resources needed to maintain routers and other equipment get shifted to system integration during merger mania. Whenever you merge disparate computer systems with many moving parts, problems are bound to happen.

24/7/365 OPERATION

If JP Morgan Chase shuts down its website now and then for weekend maintenance, as it sometimes does, or the NYC subway shuts down a line for track work, then it might be an inconvenience, but nothing will fall out of the sky. Not so with airlines. Their systems must be fully operational every minute of the year. So that makes shutdowns for maintenance nearly impossible, until, that is, things shut down.

DEFERRED MAINTENANCE

And speaking of maintenance, just like our bridges and public transit systems, when the cash is scarce, maintenance gets postponed. When airlines were losing billions, were they more concerned with maintaining their planes or their computer systems? Obviously, safety came first.

IT BRAIN DRAIN

Google, Facebook and their ilk are sucking up all the IT talent with their hefty paychecks and stock options, deals that the airlines can’t compete with. Every company running computer systems (and that’s every company these days) faces the same challenge attracting and retaining enough IT help.

HUMAN ERROR

When that poor Delta employee back on December 26, 2013, entered $20 first-class fares to Hawaii into the reservation system, down from the usual $1,200 each way, costing the airline tens of millions and the hapless employee (so we heard through the grapevine) his job, how did Delta’s programmers not design their systems to pop up a window on his computer screen asking “Are you out of your mind?” The fact that these fare mistakes can make it into airline- reservation systems just shows you how much work still needs to be done.

George Hobica is founder of the low-airfare listing website Airfarewatchdog.com.