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More Airline Outages Seen As Carriers Grapple With Aging Technology (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Airlines will likely suffer more disruptions like the one that grounded about 2,000 Delta flights this week because major carriers have not invested enough to overhaul reservations systems based on technology dating to the 1960s, airline industry and technology experts told Reuters. Airlines have spent heavily to introduce new features such as automated check-in kiosks, real-time luggage tracking and slick mobile apps. But they have avoided the steep cost of rebuilding their reservations systems from the ground up, former airline executives said. Scott Nason, former chief information officer at American Airlines Group Inc, said long-term investments in computer technology were a tough sell when he worked there. "Most airlines were on the verge of going out of business for many years, so investment of any kind had to have short pay-back periods," said Nason, who left American in 2009 and is now an independent consultant. The reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility, or TPF. It was designed in the 1960s to process large numbers of transactions quickly and is still updated by IBM, which did a major rewrite of the operating system about a decade ago.
The problem is that if all of your competitors are willing to go bankrupt every 15 years its' really hard to not go bankrupt before they do. It doesn't do you any good if they'll be going bankrupt in 8 years if you go bankrupt next year because you're 10% more expensive.
We see that in my industry all the time. Lots of people undercutting sustainable rates. They inevitably go bankrupt but if you don't match prices you'll go bankrupt waiting for them to go first. And since they're offering products at under cost they can also appeal to investors with fat grosses and rapid growth.
Imagine for instance you were trying to take on Amazon. Amazon hasn't really ever made money. But they can point to their rapid growth for long term investors. If you're an airline you probably won't see growth and it's hard to say "look we're losing a lot of money now but in 8 years when our competitors hit a hard time we'll make some money then until someone else comes along and promises to do what we do but cheaper and never go out of business." You see that with Jetblue and Virgin America. Jump into the industry with lots of investment. Offer a product at razor thin margins and capture a ton of market. But their business plan isn't tested to survive a big recession. So it's a gamble. They'll either do great or it'll reveal they were built on sand.
When your competitors are playing with fire it means they capture all of the revenue when times are good leaving you nothing to save for the "bad times" and then you only prosper when the market is crappy anyway and they can write off their debt in bankruptcy. It's a lose lose.
No one credible would count duplicate equipment in the same data center to be any kind of DR plan at all. That's like confusing RAID with backup. And just like you don't have a backup unless you've tested it, you don't have a DR plan unless you've tested it.
But a "disaster plan" needn't be limited to IT in any way. Air France had some sort of computing disaster recently, a similarly total outage, but they completed all their scheduled flights (not on schedule, but still). They had a disaster plan involving everyone behind a counter at an airport on the phone to a massive call center, where everything was verified "manually" from offline backup systems (and possibly print-outs). "Is Joe Slashdotter booked for flight 123?" "Give me a minute - yup, let him on the plane." Low tech, but it worked.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.