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'IT Issue' Grounded All United Airlines Flights In The US (nbcnews.com)
For two and a half hours -- no take-offs. An anonymous reader quotes NBC News:
All of United Airlines' domestic flights were grounded Sunday night because of a computer outage, the Federal Aviation Administration said as scores of angry travelers sounded off on social media... U.S. officials told NBC News that the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, had issues with low bandwidth. No further explanation was immediately available for what United described only as "an IT issue."
An hour ago United tweeted that they'd finally lifted the stop and were "working to get flights on their way." 66 flights were cancelled just at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, the Chicago Department of Aviation told the Associated Press, and though the article doesn't identify the total number of flights affected, "Chicago-based United Airlines and United Express operate more than 4,500 flights a day to 339 airports across five continents."
An hour ago United tweeted that they'd finally lifted the stop and were "working to get flights on their way." 66 flights were cancelled just at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, the Chicago Department of Aviation told the Associated Press, and though the article doesn't identify the total number of flights affected, "Chicago-based United Airlines and United Express operate more than 4,500 flights a day to 339 airports across five continents."
Well at least thats better than no landings
Good thing Obama is no longer president, or we would be nuking Russia for their "hacking" of a US airline...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Windows 10 must be downloading another monster update...
airplanes are poop!
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Gotta love rebooting when MS wants you to reboot.
Why UAL is my last resort airline. I will only use them when there is no alternative.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This is not the first airline this has happened to, I think now something like three airlines in about a year? How on earth do all of these separate companies have the same problems where ANY breakage of the system mean planes with schedules pre-determined ages ago cannot fly? Is there some kind of Intuit Turbo Airline Manager software they all run??
WTF!
This is probably the strongest demonstration yet that we are all living in a computer simulation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Someday they might move to the cloud to avoid scalability issues which shut down flights for hours.
Takes hours.
j/k (I have no idea what happened)
Those fucking nerds in IT always breaking shit.
I'll bet their MDM admin forgot to renew their server-size cert! That would prevent any of their iPads from downloading the necessary, updated flight information. Or, even better, someone really screwed up and revoked the previous cert instead of just importing the new one.
U.S. officials told NBC News that the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, had issues with low bandwidth.
so you're complaining that a 60wpm VHF-based system from the late seventies that was never designed for high bandwidth communication beyond 300 baud, has problems delivering bandwidth intensive data? the average ACARS datagram is only 8 tuples. it sounds like one United's H1B candidates didnt take the time to RTFM before rolling out their code and immediately clobbered the system with garbage XML or metadata some middle manager wanted to include to improve productivity.
Good people go to bed earlier.
And is that question scribbled on airport walls country wide?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The children of the magenta have taken over the airlines, and now the op specs won't let us hand jam the flight data in. This is, of course, fucking retarded, because all airline pilots are completely capable, competent, and routinely train to flying these things by hand, using reversionary navigation. I can, indeed, fly the 'Bus across the ocean without ACARS, without GPS, without the computer figuring out takeoff and landing data, and without datalink weather. The airplane is actually well designed, and the FMS navigation is excellent on DME/DME and good enough on raw INS to at least find Ireland, at which point I can get VOR navigation back and take an ILS into any commercial airport in the Europe, the Americas or the Pacific (there are sketchy places in Asia and Africa.)
"There's no reason to become alarmed, and we hope you'll enjoy the rest of your flight. By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?" - Elaine Dickinson
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I love reading when a company that is critical dependent on their IT infrastructure to function, cuts as many corners (and jobs) as possible in IT to save a buck, then has it all blow up in their face.
Target, Home Depot, United, Yahoo, etc.....they'll save millions, until they end up losing billions.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Is United still using the Apollo system on IBM 370 mainframes? Last time I paid any attention to it that's what they were doing.
Mod me up. You know what I'm talking about.
Squirrels cause more damage to infrastructure than humans and natural disasters. No joke. NSA even acknowledged it. http://cybersquirrel1.com/
did they try turning it off and then back on?
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
DDoS.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
A software developer reaaally doesn't want to come in to work on Monday.
I stole this Sig
Many Guitars were saved.. because we all know United Breaks Guitars.
--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!
So, what type of encryption did they use in the 1970s? My guess is none at all.
ACARS must have become a critical component. Otherwise they would have just taken off without it. Used the voice radio instead. If it is critical, is it secured? Nope.
(Voice communication is also unsecured, and idiots with VHS radios have occasionally caused nuisance. But voice is between human beings who can generally figure out what is going on.)
I hope that somebody who has worked on these systems will comment here. ACARS is a satellite-based system and I don't think that each airline has their own satellite. So how is it that this only affected United and not everybody? Something doesn't add up here. There are a lot of snarky comments here but on-board aircraft software doesn't get updated en mass. The only thing I can really think of is that the ground-based IT systems were unable to process ACARS data. But that wouldn't be for bandwidth-related issues!
Russia is perhaps trying some small-scale hacking in view of a larger control of US industries and infrastructures...
Take all of those whinny little travelers and reply back: "If you think it's easy keeping computer systems up, running and online for US wide air traffic control, please submit your resume or shutup!"
It's funny how this occurred just hours after a leftist was booted from a UAL flight for berating a Trump supporter and causing a scene.
I wonder how many Russian hackers work for George Soros. A gracious plenty I would imagine.
From what I've gleaned from the measly information dripping out our way, the basis of the NextGen ATC system is going to be based on ACARS. This scares me greatly, as ACARS in my experience in using it over the past decade is that it's utterly unreliable. "ACARS NO COMM" is seen in the MCDU scratchpad far more than any other message. They better have a super-duper improved communication network ready for this, or I'm calling it right now - it's a dead-in-the-water system if it attempts to use today's utterly fragile ACARS network.
You can possibly add Air France 447 to that list. Air France chose not to replace the air speed indicators until the plane returned to France on what would be its last flight. The passengers and crew lost that gamble. I have no inside knowledge as to whether that was for cost reasons, lack of training in Rio where they simply didn't know how to do the job there, or control freak reasons (I worked for a French company and until you actually work for them you really have no idea how much of a control freak the French are about everything) but failure to replace the air speed indicators prior to that flight started the chain of events that led to the crash.
Encryption, fucktard, is not magically better. See, encryption adds complexity to the system. It adds failure points. It makes fault detection much, much more difficult. It makes formal verification extremely difficult, if not impossible. What exactly do you think encryption would add to this system to make it better?
@nimbius: "so you're complaining that a 60wpm VHF-based system from the late seventies that was never designed for high bandwidth communication beyond 300 baud, has problems delivering bandwidth intensive data?
Why would local congestion take out all of United Airlines' domestic flights? I suspect the problem occured at the centeralized message routing system. Which apparently doesn't come with any build-in failure modes.
Did they turn it off and on again?
I provided 24 hour support for a Tier 1 aviation conglomerate and can tell you, the bailing wire and scripts used to keep avionics data flowing work just fine. The management, contracts and personnel are weak spots (but what's shocking about that in any legacy industry?). The amazing thing is that more civilians don't investigate the status of the industry more closely; of course that's probably because you don't realize what a line you're really being fed while you're sitting on the tarmac waiting for take-off, or when you're waiting in the terminal for one of the many "weather delays".
I no longer fly commercial as a passenger.