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United Airlines Passengers Stranded By Computer Outage
From reader Peter McDermott comes word of a computer outage with effects to dwarf those of the one that stranded thousands of US Airways passengers last week. This time, it's United Airlines' systems that are out of commission and unable to handle passenger reservations, leaving passengers stranded all over the U.S. According to Peter, experiencing the resultant delays first-hand at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., United planes are being sent on — along with their passengers' luggage — to the cities from which they're to leave tomorrow morning, in anticipation of the computer system being fixed in the interim.
Are the passengers getting their luggage shipped in the planes and not allowed to board or what's happening? As far as I know sending a plane with luggage for a passenger that hasn't boarded is against FAA rules.
Confusion...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
So, when will LulzSec admit that they wer behind this. I'm sure the airlines will never admit to being hacked.
At what point do you stop thinking of this as a glitch and start thinking of it as an attack?
Instead of getting an AI that just wants to outright kill us all, we got one that just wants to fuck with us...
Airline mainframe of the size of an United are usually separated in several backends. One for the Reservation/Inventory & Ticketing and Scheduling, another for the OPS, check In, Weight and balance. Sometiems even more mainframe. Basically when you "book" you add your own PNR (passenger Name Recvord) to the invetory system thru the reservation system, this can happens directly with the airline own system, or a GDS system (think travel agency using Amadeus / Sabre), once the sales is done the ticketing system (for the own airline ticket stocks / travel agency use IATA stocks) generate the ticket, in the past paper ticket, nowaday mostly etickets. After that shortly before departure (24h to 28h) the RES system send the PNL (passenger Name List) to the GHS (groudn Handler system, can also be the airline own check in system, but can be a special firm asked to do it, airport systems, or a partner airline, for example United is checked-in by Lufthansa in Frankfurt, and vice versa the Check in is done by United for Lufthansa in the US) that GH system usually when it receives the PNL get the ticket ferom the ticketing database (either directly thru an itnern link, or using edifact message , namely the TKCREQ ground handling message).
The reason I doubt this was the RES system, is that this would mean there would be *NO SALES* or *BOOKING* if it weas the RES system, where as flight would continueb to operate for 24h about. Whereas here the flight stopperd, but nothing is said about sales stopping. Therefore I can see a number of sub system stopping working : WAB, but for those usually you can have load sheets as work around, and unless the UA agent are kept dumb, they have that as work around. That could be MES , messaging, where the message (PNL & Edifact) don't go reach the GH place, but it is doubtful as this would mean that the glitch was yesterday.
That leaves the check in system glitching , or the OPS system (the one handling the scheduled departure of flights). Seeing that the picture is a picture of a MANUAL boarding pass , I tend to think this was the check in system which failed. Anotehr evidence that this is the CHeck in of UA which failed and not the RES system , si that other origin which are NOT ground handled by UA , like FRA are working. Only the local check in from UA seems to be impacted.
There are naturally work around that for a short time (manual boarding pass, paper PNL and check list) but those are short stop gp measure. I can imagine UA sending pax in hotel and getting this corrected / solved during the night.
That was a little nitpick : RES from UA did not break, almost certainly CKI from UA broke (check in). That is as much a difference as Amazon warehouse and sales breaking , or their delivery service breaking. That said for the stranded Pax : no difference probably.
Baggage for which the pax did not fly with are routinely sent thru other flights. This is the case when baggage are lost and msut be resent to the correct destination, or when the pax started a multiple leg travel, but one of the onto legs are missed. In such case the baggage continue to travel, but the pax not. What is forbidden, if I remember correctely, is that a pax for the initial leg do not fly but the baggage do : in such a case you have to unboard the baggage at the same time you unboard the pax.
This regularly happens to Virgin in Australia.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Isn't that also known as "business as usual"? Their most frequent customers wouldn't even notice.
I've only flown United twice. The first time there was a 5 hour delay. The second time there was a 3 hour delay. So today's delay sounds par for the course.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
... to make a really big mess, you need computers.
Must be karma for booting a passenger off Flight 488 earlier in the week for wearing baggy pants. They must be too busy acting as fashion police than to be concerned with their IT infrastructure. Accompanying YouTube video to the above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOQI_FhKbw0
United Airlines - greyhound buses with wings.
It's hard to make sense of the incident without more details. How much is M$ Windoze involved in creating the problems? I'd assume it's at the heart of the matter.
I was waiting for my mother on a flight from Dallas to Denver. They could not tell me if the plane was delayed, if it was canceled, if it arrived. I waited 2 hours and finally the general airport screens removed the flight from arrivals (still with 2 hour previous expected time). The United people could not even tell me the flight was canceled. Finally I reached my mother as she had just returned home. Supposedly they will automagically reschedule every flight and call with new flight details. That was 4 1/2 hours ago. The flight was canceled almost 6 hours ago. 10 minutes ago United called my father, who had purchased the ticket for my mother, and informed him the flight was canceled.
After spending 36 hours in DIA (Denver Intl Airport) due to a spring snowstorm that shut down the entire airport, I will never again fly United if I can help it and DIA (United's major western hub) is to be avoided at all costs.
The most demoralizing thing in the world is to wake up from a night sleeping on the airport floor and watch freshly scrubbed local customers board the plane that you could not fly out of town the night before. That's right: United dumped all (paid, booked) passengers from our previous night's canceled flight on standby.
Want to feel a real kick in the nuts? Walk up to a departure gate and ask how many passengers are wait-listed to your home town...Ans: 99.
The only way we escaped DIA in a relatively short period of time was due to my wife's "constructive confrontation" with a United ticketing agent.
Absolutely no chance this is a "Windoze" problem.
This will be a problem with a mainframe, probably but not necessarily software.
It's hard to say until after the dust has settled. It could also be a network configuration issue. I observed a similar problem on Icelandair some weeks ago at Seattle.
The check-in terminals just would not work, or worked, but hideously slowly. Since I was first to check in (at the desk before it opened), they got me checked in on all four flights, and even got my bag tagged properly to my destination, but it took 15-ish minutes. They managed a few more passengers before they gave up or the system failed completely. Opening 2 more check-in desks had not helped, and they did not have time to spend 15 minutes per check-in for a full 757. Most of the almost 200 people subsequently in the departure lounge thus had no boarding pass, and were not checked to any connecting flights. I have no idea what their luggage status was.
The story volunteered by one of the technical support persons, two of whom were already there during my lengthy check-in, was that it was a network configuration issue with the terminals (i.e. Windows or their LAN), but he was busy enough that nobody bothered him for further details. No other airlines were affected, as far as I know. I can imagine a network configuration issue completely borking processes for a larger airline, especially if it was a globally propagated routing screw-up or similar.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
This regularly happens to Virgin in Australia.
Passengers getting fucked by Virgin?
Is this some sort of "in Soviet Russia" joke?
That's nothing.
According to the BBC, there is now another virgin notifying "customers" who got infected.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
United needs to fire their IT overlords. As usual, the shit is blamed on computers, but it's the IT department or possibly an external vendor, who really fucked things up. Get it? It's not the computers. It's the people responsible for them who blew it. Fire them.
"The big decision is in: United Airlines plans to wean itself off its decades-long reservations-system provider, Travelport’s Apollo, and to migrate its reservations to HP’s SHARES system in 2012". link
"The Apollo reservation system used by United Airlines was down worldwide for at least four hours Tuesday", Jan 2006 link
Did United outsource their IT?
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
time to dump the old terminal system and move to a new system you can keep the old look and feel if that easier on the people useing the system and slowly work in a new GUI.
if they'll ever learn to move away from Windows.
Qantas have a few problems with their new Dallas/Fort worth to Australia route where they ship all the luggage by seperate flights via LAX. With the planes they've got on the route they can't carry enough fuel otherwise. It's a quick service though - passengers get to Australia so quickly they can beat their luggage there by up to two days :)
Something like that actually did happen a few years back in a predictably incompetent way. A Homeland Security owned PC with a dodgy network card caused a packet storm at a US airport and could not be disconnected until an authorised Homeland Security person turned up some hours later. That put quite a few airline systems at that airport offline for those hours - I can't remember which airport it was (think it was in LA or San Francisco) but it was in the press at the time.
Sunday morning: Still down.
They can book people on flights and move them even from one flight to another, so it isn't RES
But before boarding they have to manually re-enter the passenger data...
I was checking on a flight this morning and according to United's site it left a minute late. In reality it was almost an hour.
While United didn't have the delay listed, both flightstats and flightaware did. So the information is available, United just doesn't want to share it with anyone. - Or do they use their own website, to prove your flight was on time?
First they went after the free drinks
and I didn't speak out, because I don't care much about getting drunk on a plane.
Then they came for mothers traveling with strollers
and I didn't speak out, because I hate the kicking children sitting behind me.
Then they came for the guitars
and I didn't speak out, because I didn't care about Canadians.
Now they're coming for me and this is really unfair.