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Computer Glitch Friday Grounded US Airways Flights
mschaffer writes "A computer glitch Friday night snarled the travel plans of US Airways customers, as reports flooded in of flights grounded around the country." As someone stranded for several hours yesterday by this outage, "glitch" seems like quite a euphemism. With outgoing flights blocked, and new ones arriving full of passengers expecting to meet connections, the atmosphere got a little heated. Customers could see nice weather, and planes lined up outside, but "The System Is Down" trumps all. The E concourse at Charlotte (a US Airways hub) was packed full of customers ranging from livid (a handful) to merely angry (most) to calmly resigned — which means those of us with seats, snacks, and books or computers. It was disheartening to see how brittle is the infrastructure the airline employs; with the part of the system visible to airline employees down, customers thought they might get more information, or even rebooking, through the US Airways website. But that was down, too, and all the desk staff could do is shrug.
OK, let's count to three and blame COBOL! :p
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
that sucks. No backup paper system in place? Can't they just read what the tickets say such as flight and seat number? They know where the flights are going as most are routine. It seems they should have been able to get *some* flights in the air.
Get a web developer
sometimes its a pain
Ive had more problems with us air and united than any other airline. Theyre incompetent
Why isn't there a backup available in case a glitch occurs?
I dont know what the "outage" was, but it seems redundancy is an afterthought with US Airways.
So, I can assume the following
There is no redundancy(zing)
There is no Recovery plan
There is no DR plan
There is no SoP on releases
There is no SoP on testing
There is no SoP on handling outages
Bravo! Now, did those new TSA rules go into effect yet? Can US Airways be fined into oblivion because of this?
Also, what are the extra fees US Airways charged its passengers for having to handle their complaints and angry faces? $100 per complaint?
I know IT fully embraced Patch Tuesday leaving us with up to a month's worth of accumulated crud, but now they've gone too far!
FTFA: "The Tempe, Ariz-based carrier cited a power outage near one of the airline's data centers in Phoenix as a possible cause."
A POWER OUTAGE?! So, no UPSes, no generators, and no multiple utilities at a main data center for a major company? Come on now...
Snarled? What is 'snarled'?
I love it when people melt down and scream and yell. Fucking christ. Shit happens. Shut your mouth, go over to the airport Starbucks and buy yourself an overpriced airport coffee and calm down. You're not helping. You're not the center of the universe, you twit; in fact, they're probably not even going to even up the scales.
(I'm one of those in the calm catagory when it comes to Emergencies, or (more likely) "emergencies.")
I specifically chose United over USAir for travel yesterday as I've had the most trouble with them. However United was also in poor shape yesterday. It was termed 'operational delays', with two hour delays across the board. Calls into United faced 25-30min wait times. And many overbooked flights.
Seems the whole industry is going down the tubes... and decreased competition from these mega-mergers are not helping.
its over folks
If you have a tiny airport near you, its better to use that (if practical)
recent experience: at Mangalore airport (IXE), The systems were "down"
Steps followed by management:
Handwritten boarding passes
For people with connections they actually called up the airport at which they were taking a new flight,(for each passenger) and had a SPOC set up for each airline at those airports.
Now, this airport handles less than 15 flights per day, but 90% of those are college students, just starting their vacations, so you can imagine the mess that would have resulted..(but it didnt due to the improvisation)
All you who choose to fly others will fly who is ever cheaper that minute. It all goes full circle. Stuff happens, deal with it.
As I am now located in proximity to an airport with a US Airways "service focus" and have had the "pleasure" of flying with them several times, I have to ask - how would you be able to tell the difference? Every time I've been in a US Airways terminal, there's always a significant number of non-weather-related delays and cancellations (compared to the other airlines' monitors). My wife and I have independently had three separate incidents this year where we were 4th and inches from having to stay overnight at an airport due to cancellations/late planes/overbooked crew/etc. In two of those cases, I had flights where we took off at the 2'55" mark, just shy of the three hour requirement to return to gate and let everyone off. The cynic in me suspects that US Airways is actually using that three hour window to plan its flights.
It's an abhorrent mess, and when I see the US Airways CEO defending against his last place customer service ranking, I have to wonder just how much denial one management team can stand.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
It is the entire industry, not just their (reliance on) their computer systems, which is brittle. They set schedules to minimize costs, which, in part, means scheduling every aircraft as intensively as they can get away with. This leaves no leeway when something goes wrong. Your inbound aircraft is late, your outbound flight will be later. Weather or maintenance issues mean your aircraft can't get to your airport? There's no "spare" to bring online to cover the gap. Plus, because they're reducing schedules in order to make individual flights fuller, there are fewer vacant seats to absorb people affected by other mishaps.
...before computers came along and made our lives so much -easier-?
Why isn't there a backup available in case a glitch occurs?
Why isn't there a backup available in case a programmer fucks something up?
FTFY.
There are no "computer glitches" only human mistakes: programming error, design flaws, or data entry mistakes - none of which are the computer's fault.
I just get peeved when customer service reps blame the computer thereby costing me money and time because someone on their end fucked up. If I arrived late and missed my flight because of a "watch glitch" you can bet your ass that they'll be the first to say, "That's not our problem! Now cough up the change fee!"
leaving me to wonder whether it was a "computer glitch" or a simple power outage. /. posters are still right, backups should be in place regardless - and yes, there is a cost associated with that which some companies choose to forego. Does anyone else get the feeling that the news is worse on weekends, when junior people with less ability to spell, get the facts, or even understand what they are reporting, are writing the copy?
or it's like Comair old system that had a failure do to being pushed to far. http://it.slashdot.org/story/04/12/30/1330230/Comair-Done-In-by-16-Bit-Counter http://it.slashdot.org/story/04/12/26/052212/Comair-System-Crashes-Passengers-Stranded http://it.slashdot.org/story/05/05/03/176254/Risk-Management---A-Cautionary-Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itn8TwFCO4M
I fly US Airways regularly. Last flight out was late taking off for no apparent reason. Our luggage did not make the connection in their own Hub. Neither did anybody else's. It took over an hour for the luggage clerk to process the long line. I counted over 500 keystrokes required per person. Staff didn't care at either airport. They would not put out luggage on the next plane in (another airlines, and they would have to pay a fee to that airline) so it was over a day to get out luggage. Two days, or three, unless we came back to the airport to pick it up. On the way home to SFO, it took over an hour for them to get out luggage onto the carousel. They had the nerve, over the PA system, to blame the passengers for having, "too much luggage," for the delay.
Consumer Reports rated US Airways at the bottom of customer satisfaction.
Planes fly. Southwest regularly makes last second changes, including flag stops (unscheduled) and re-using planes for "second runs."
There was LOTS that US Airways could have done. First, they could have flown the planes if they wanted too. They planes had already been scheduled, so there were no questions of maintenance or fuel, or flight plans. Second, they could reimburse passengers for the delays. Third, they could have rescheduled some passenger.
Then, of course, as said, there is simply no excuse for the IT to be down for that long, if at all. They had no (working) backup systems, either computers, paper, or people. That is the very definition of incompetent.
I work in IT. As a guy said in my last meeting, “Anybody who designs in RAID 5 should be shot.” Duh.
The fact is that the airlines management is incompetent. This is not an opinion. Simply too many facts. The board should completely clean house. When the questions comes up in the next board meeting of, “What to do?” the answer is, “Duh.”
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Given a choice between two competing airlines flying to the same place, the vast majority of passengers will book based solely on published cost.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of hidden fees, that means that the airlines have no choice but to trim every possible cost to be competitive. I'm not in the airline industry, so I'm guessing here. I suspect that means no extra flight crews on standby for unexpected events, no extra gate crew coverage, the absolute minimum of phone lines to handle problems, etc.
I recall flying 30 years ago, and there were airport staff sometimes standing around with nothing to do. But when things got weird, the resolution was much easier because of the flex built into the system. That was when consumers had brand loyalty (perhaps because they had no tool other than the phone to compare prices).
On a recent trip there was a major weather event, and our plane ended up in a comedy of errors which would have been funny except for the fact that I was stuck in my seat for 12 hours. In the end, we were at an airport with no company terminals to dock at. The city run airport transportation staff had left for the night, so we couldn't be driven from the plane. According to the airport rules there, we couldn't use another company terminal unless there was an emergency. With the prospect of his passengers spending another 8 hours on the plane, the captain declared a "medical emergency" so we were allowed to deplane at the nearest empty gate. I will forever be grateful for that pilot, and the balls he had to do that, knowing that it might impact his career.
The next morning when I tried to resolve my issue with the airline, every call to the customer service line was not met with "we regret that you will be on hold for 2 hours", but instead "we regret that we are not able to answer your call at this time", and then a dial tone. The web site offered no help either, claiming that due to system issues, they were unable to handle the volume of information requests. I ended up booking another flight on my own dime (well... the company's dime anyway) with another airline.
Would I be willing to pay twice the cost for an airline flight to make this kind of crap go away? Sure. But I suspect I'm one of a few. I bet the vast majority of air travelers only go once in a while, and tend to forget what carrier they used last time, no matter how bad the service was.
Closer to Caos... lol
You may be right about the three-hour flight planning. I wouldn't be surprised if this were true.
Cheap Fares = Cheap service! What do you want for $300 (cheaper fares than 30 years ago) and if there is a problem you want REIMBURSEMENT of $500 what BS! we need to go back to real airfares and get rid of the cheapo bunch and only let the ones who can afford it fly again, Of course all the deregulation and any industry has the same results...It's Cheaper, but look where we are.
Back to the old days and let the cheaper crowd take the bus...oh wait Greyhound cost more than airline tickets...
I love the weather comments. They show that people just don't think on a large scale. I work at Dallas Love Field and I went home an hour late last night because of bad weather in the morning on the other side of the country. Most people would not realize that.
Couldn't they just look out the window? Maybe that big thing outside the window that a whole bunch of people recently walked off of just happens to be the plane everyone at the gate is waiting to board?
Maybe, but probably not.
If you land a plane at an airport, and go and park at a gate, what are the odds that the people waiting for a flight at that gate are supposed to be on the same plane that you just parked there?
Even if you get lucky, how is anyone supposed to even know what gate they are supposed to be at?
paintball
The article did not really say what happened to the stranded passengers...I wish they covered that a little more.
The word "backup" is often confused with "practice" ... backups who needs backups?
I was recently in O'Hare passing through the terminal that houses US Airways' gates, and instead of the nice big screen LCD displays showing flight information everywhere, they had these tiny CRTs that looked like they were being run by an old PC/Jr or Amiga.
Maybe their flight system had an IRQ conflict or ran out of extended RAM. They should really avoid loading those device drivers in the 640k base memory space. Check config.sys, perhaps?
I fly very rarely; last time I did was August 2010 out of Chicago (O'Hare) on United (actually a United-branded regional carrier, but it went directly back to my hometown.) Get up early to make sure I'm to the airport on time, and the flight ends up delayed several hours.
Insufficient sample size, I know...
* my schedule had allowed me to cheap out and take Amtrak _into_ Chicago, which went by with only relatively minor delats.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Utrecht is a central city in Holland where pretty much all the railway lines intersect for no smart reason.
So, if there is an issue at Utrecht like a fire alarm at the control center, there better be a backup or all train travel in Holland is seriously affected.
Luckily the backup control center is there.... right there... in the same building... small building... affected by the same fire alarm...
But hey, lets not immidiately order a load of busses to deal with stranded passengers, people have become so used to the troubles that they will no doubt fix it themselves, yet again.
You can't run complex operations on a shoe-string budget and expect to continue to work without a hitch. Yet we cut back on them or use budget operators because... well... we take the risk and then bitch about but will still refuse to fund public transport or book the cheapest flight possible.
That is why there isn't a good backup solution, you are not willing to pay for it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You said it: the reason people flew ok in the 40s and 50s but can't now without computers is scale. There's just so much higher volume of air traffic, critical systems depend on computers to track too many things. Random 737s flying around a crowded air space unannounced could be a little dangerous, to say the least.
If you reduced the number of flights to 40s levels probably you could do without computers. I guess this means your regional hub reducing to flying maybe one plane an hour with 20 passenger seats on each?
If we keep relying on technology to do everything for us that SHOULD have better manual / redundant systems in place, we will see more of this in every phase of our lives.
Starliner
Please, how about printing all the important information ad a 2D barcode on the tickets (cryptographically signed. of course), which can be read without a connection to the central system and having for the really important stuff = scheduling of planes a second independent system. I always wonder that the cost of these sw bugs could easily go into the tens of millions of $ , so it should be possible to take measures not to be completely dependent on a single point of failure.