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American Airlines Grounds Flights
Sez Zero writes "The Federal Aviation Administration said American Airlines requested a halt to hundreds of its U.S. flights on Tuesday as it works to resolve a reservation system problem. American Airlines explained on their Twitter feed they had a problem accessing their reservation system. Bad day to be on the AA ops team."
From various airlines: 2004 #1, 2004 #2, 2011 #1, 2011 #2, and probably others I missed.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"At American's hub in Miami, The Miami Herald reports that landing AA flights have run out of available gates since none of the airline's departures are taking off. A passenger on one of those flights -- 66-year-old Richard Bell -- tells the Herald he had been stuck on an AA flight arriving from Baltimore. He told the newspaper that the aircraft's engines were running and that the air conditioning was working. But he also said the flight's pilots come over the public address system to warn fliers that some other systems were not functioning. "He mentioned the toilet specifically as a problem,'' Bell tells the Herald."
This is total lack of human compassion that someone can't get in one of those tractors, push the plane at the gate out of the way to a spot off to the side and let the plane with the people unload. What kind of heartless ass is running American's operations at that airport? Oh, gee, that might inconvenience the airline personel because the first plane would then have to be trundled back over since it needs to leave first when things resume.
I currently work for Silver Airways, but as I've experienced first hand, almost all of the airlines software system's suck some major ballsack. None of the airlines have undergone the massive rewrite that their reservations system need and they just keep bolting on more pieces of crap code to these ancient systems. United uses SHARES, and so does Silver Airways, but 2 different versions of the same software, and to make things worse, ours is rented off of Island Air and not a single human being can fix any of the stuff they need to do. The Silver Airways version doesn't even handle baggage charges in a decent fashion, forcing their employees to build a reservation just for a bag fee. It's always great when you have a functional TELEX printer that you can't use because not even the IT department can figure out how the hell SHARES is trying to route output. Personally, all the airlines are damned for not spending any money in updating reservations systems from the late 70s and early 80s. If you anyone is interested, you can basically trace all of the airlines reservations systems back to a company called EDS, which was at one time owned by Ross Perot.
I'm a Sabre employee. The issue today was not related to any Sabre systems.
“American Airlines mistakenly reported they were having an issue with the Sabre reservations system, which they subsequently corrected. To clarify, all Sabre systems are operating as normal and have been all day. We see American Airlines is now up and running. We stand ready to help if needed.”
Dan
You see, no it isn't exactly like you say. I have written and have in production interfaces with SHARES and the problem isn't so much their infrastructure, as they are actively doing a lot more upgrades (I actually have had conference calls with their IT managers while migrating one of their systems) than anyone thinks. The problem is more operational than anything, but since I am actively under an NDA concerning things like that I can't bring up any specifics. Other than that, the other problem is too many vendors under the same roof. I have seen systems that have had probably every company in the business do an update somewhere to some module or piece of the system and THAT is what makes these things more of a nightmare than anything. The nice simple ones where it was a streamlined job, are very easy to upgrade and keep current.
Now that isn't to say that some of the current systems are not old and outdated, but many of the carriers are in the process of performing these upgrades right now (I have insider knowledge on that because of the work my company does). The general time-frame for large scale system upgrades varies between 5 to 10 years it seems, depending on how stable the original system actually was. I can also say that American actually just rolled out some new updates to several of their systems including their check-in and processing, and they are currently doing upgrades to other existing framework elsewhere. Smaller upgrades are usually much more frequent, but these are more behind the scenes and not something a customer would ever see.
Most of the legacy systems are surprisingly stable, and in fact there are more hiccups during the initial roll-out of new systems than anything else. This one is still up in the air it seems as to what or who was the culprit. More than likely it is a new system hiccup and things kind of fell through at a really bad time. I feel for whoever was scrambling trying to fix it, I have heard some nasty stories from our guys on emergency support calls and have had a few crappy ones myself.
And FYI you are referring to FIMS not FOMS, and United actually uses FLIFO for their flight information (again have interfaces in production right now working with it), and SHARES is run through mostly data-center grade servers and not mainframes (though they do still use a lot of command line to interface with the system).
P.S. I don't mean the post to come off condescending or anything, just I have much more intimate knowledge of these systems and felt I could share a little bit to allow for a better understanding of things.