'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."

Comments

No Take offs?

[rossdee]

Well at least thats better than no landings

Windows 10 Auto Reboot

[zenlessyank]

Gotta love rebooting when MS wants you to reboot.

What is up with airlines IT structure

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:What is up with airlines IT structure

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Well, probably because this back-end system, is managed by what used to be Hewlett Packard Enterprise. They've had so many layoffs, and shuffled from company to company so many times, that the people who actually know what they are doing are all long gone.

Re:What is up with airlines IT structure

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually capitalism does work. Airline accidents are at an all time low even with much higher passenger miles, costs for a ticket are accessible to most people, delays and lost luggage aren't nearly as common, and there are plenty of choices in scheduling a flight.

But you meant something else, and I proved you wrong. How does it feel to be a socialist and wrong?

Re:What is up with airlines IT structure

[dbIII]

What you attach to a backhoe is your own business.

Re:What is up with airlines IT structure

[dunkelfalke]

How exactly airplane accidents being at an all time low is a result of capitalism? Are you one of these crazy people who worship capitalism as a deity?
Airplane accidents don't happen that often anymore because of strict regulations and aircraft being generally more intelligent. Capitalism has directly caused a lot of accidents, like Alaska Airlines Flight 261 (airline was too cheap for proper maintenance), Turkish Airlines Flight 981 (manufacturer was too cheap to fix a known design error), American Airlines Flight 191 (again, airline too cheap to do proper maintenance), JAL Flight 123 (yep, again maintenance) and so on. Yay capitalism. Same goes for delays and lost luggage, by the way. Strict regulations making it difficult for the airlines to weasel themselves out have helped, not capitalism.

Re:What is up with airlines IT structure

[im_thatoneguy]

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?

Because all of them depend on software to handle their flight scheduling. Imagine this scenario: a plane lands 30 minutes late into Denver with 200 passengers. 50 of them will now miss their flight. Those 50 passengers are going to set off a cascade of modifications automatically to hundreds of dependencies. No human being can keep thousands of flights and millions of passengers in their head at once. There used to be a lot more slop in the system and margin for error. Now a plane delayed landing is almost certainly a plane delayed departing. The entire system has to minimize the damage by deciding whether it makes sense to delay a handful of flights to ensure they make it or attempt to accommodate them on later flights. And if they delay those later flights how will that impact all of the passengers on those flights, etc etc etc. What about that storm in Chicago which will undoubtedly delay any aircraft who don't leave *now*? There are millions of variables and millions of dependencies and if the satellite tracking system goes down suddenly the system won't know if a plane is going to be on-time or if it'll be an hour late. The only safe conclusion is to just stop all traffic until everything is sorted.

When you stop and think about it an Airline's IT system *IS* the company's day-to-day/minute-to-minute management. So if part of the system goes down in one region that will affect the whole system since a passenger currently in Tokyo very well may be flying to Singapore on a plane arriving from Denver. It's a global network of millions of interdependent pieces.

Many airlines are taking measures to minimize these impacts. It used to be that a plane would leave New York, arrive in Chicago, leave Chicago, arrive in Phoenix, leave Phoenix arrive in Seattle, stay for the night and work its way backwards. If the plane was delayed along any stop everything would get delayed. Airlines are trying to reroute their networks so that a plane just circulates back and forth between 1-2 places in a day.

from TFA

[nimbius]

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.

Re:from TFA

[AmiMoJo]

Actually this is a genuine issue with the shear number of aircraft in the sky. Radio systems have issues with hidden transmitters, that is if you have two aircraft who both want to send a message at the same time but can't hear each other they both start transmitting, and a receiver in the middle hears both simultaneously and neither is intelligible. It's particularly bad with wifi, and now air traffic is getting the same problem.

As things get busy the problem is amplified by re-transmissions, additional messages due to equipment failures and warning conditions like low fuel, more and more aircraft joining parking areas waiting to land and so forth.

The system could do with an overhaul, but it's well established, works over long ranges and is relatively cheap.

Re:Must be Russia

[lucm]

Good thing Obama is no longer president, or we would be nuking Russia for their "hacking" of a US airline...

It would never happen. They would just call the Scorpion guy and get him to rollback a buggy Windows Update like he did at LAX in 2014.

Nervous?

[Vinegar Joe]

"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

and once again, cutting corners in IT backfires

[Indy1]

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.

Re:It's not Russia, it's the squirrels

[BlueStrat]

Squirrels cause more damage to infrastructure than humans and natural disasters. No joke. NSA even acknowledged it. http://cybersquirrel1.com/

Nyet!

Moose and Squirrel sold out and are now double-agents working for Dear Leader!

Strat

Somewhere

[quantaman]

A software developer reaaally doesn't want to come in to work on Monday.

Re:Somewhere

[archilochus]

Anyone else remember this (yes, I'm that old): http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-01-31

Many Guitars were saved...

[REden]

Many Guitars were saved.. because we all know United Breaks Guitars.

Low bandwidth

[edtice1559]

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!

Re:One more reason...

[dunkelfalke]

Dave Carroll, is that you?

Re:Must be Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-sequitor. We haven't nuked anything, and not for events much more egregious than preventing takeoffs of a single major airline which experienced a rather trivial IT outage - the type of thing that has happened all-too-often at the airlines without any outside interference.

You missed the sarcasm.

Under 8 years of Obama, the US completely ignored hacking by China and Russia - China stole the entire OPM database of cleared US government workers, and Obama did nothing. No response at all.

Hell, Obama knew about Russian hacking of the DNC last summer - and did nothing. Why the hell do you think the Russians thought they could get away with hacking the DNC? Because Obama had let it happen for years.. Obama didn't even bother with some bogus "red line" threat of retaliation.

"OMG RUSSIAN HACKING!!!" didn't become a big deal until Hillary needed an excuse.

Re:Must be Russia

[AvitarX]

I'd think getting Saudi Arabia to pump more oil was all that needed to be done.

You don't think Putin is aware that his behavior and that are related? You don't think that's why he wanted to make sure there wasn't a democrat in office?

Re: One more reason...

[ColdWetDog]

If you need 5 cubic feet of batteries and drugs on your flight ... well, I sure hope to hell you are having a good time.