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.

Comments

Re:Dumb

[lgw]

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.