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Comair System Crashes; Passengers Stranded

Posted by timothy on from the for-very-high-values-of-too-many dept.

Broerman writes "30,000 people have had their flights cancelled by Comair this weekend thanks to a computer system shutdown. It appears that due to weather and other problems that flights began to be cancelled on Thursday and the backlog choked the system. 1,100 flights have been cancelled so far, including all flights through 12/26. Does anyone know what platform their system was based on? What kind of system just totally crashes? The official statement is that 'There was a cumulative effect with the canceled flights and trying to get crew assigned that caused the system to be overwhelmed.' It seems highly improbable that a system would crash because it had too many reservations. The system should only be able to hold as many reservations as it has flights/seats. It would seem that it's more likely that the system was overloaded with use and that caused a meltdown. When you add in the problems experienced by US Airways, this hasn't been a Merry Christmas for many."

6 of 398 comments (clear)

  1. Official my arse... by Omicron32 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sounds like my Mother wrote the official statement. A techy would never report something in that way.

    Besides, it's pretty obvious their OS wasn't digitally signed. :p

  2. Re:Fire away! by mirko · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There recently was a big card problem here, in Europe.
    It did not come from a peculiar OS but just because a partition got filled by index tablespace extents.
    So, it could just be that they ran out of place and it froze the whole application.

    --
    Trolling using another account since 2005.
  3. stating the obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Does anyone know what platform their system was based on? What kind of system just totally crashes?"

    A stab in the dark here but I'm assuming a system without foresight and redundancy?

  4. blaming the system can backfire by ext42fs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not the OS, it's the people behind who's to blame. Yes, stupidity and MSW often go together but in a few years one will probably occasionally see a massive linux outage due to... similarly stupid people.

  5. Re:Scalability and Twelve Step TrustABLE IT by hughk · · Score: 4, Insightful
    No, its more difficult in the airline industry. The system by default tries to keep as many planes in the air earning money as possible. If you have an outage which disrupts this choreography, there is a tremendous knock-on effect as passengers/urgent cargo must be rebooked.

    I have seen the major hub for an airline closed because of snow for just a couple of hours in the early morning, but the resulting chaos of rescheduling/rebooking caused the reservations system to crash after just a few minutes of uptime. The same would keep happening after restarts.

    It is normal to test system up to several times normal load, but they were seeing peaks at over 100x. The old, 3270 emulator based system would have slowly got through it but the newer system died.

    --
    See my journal, I write things there
  6. Re:Someone's gotta say it... by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Occasionally, however, the head IT guy gets over-ridden by management or by available finances. I've been there, saying "we need to spend money on this" and having to make do with much less money, or even with a cut in funding. You need to document the problem in advance to cover your ass, and get it in print and saved offsite to protect yourself from that kind of mistake. I've done that, too. It helped protect me from a nasty lawsuit because I demonstrated where I had told a consulting client, in print, when the systems would start failing and the resulting legal liabilities, and gotten it signed by the company notary.