Slashdot Mirror
This Week 'IT Issues' Ground Delta Airlines' Flights (cnbc.com)
Delta Air Lines has been forced to cancel at least 150 flights, and expects to cancel even more. But "the IT department is working to rectify the situation as soon as possible," they tweeted Sunday -- more than four hours ago. Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes CNBC:
Delta Air Lines U.S. domestic flights were grounded on Sunday evening due to automation issues, according to an advisory from the Federal Aviation Administration... "Delta teams are expeditiously working to fix a systems outage that has resulted in departure delays for flights on the ground," the airline said in the statement. "Flights in the air remain unaffected". [And their international flights were unaffected.]
Delta also grounded 2,000 flights last summer after a computer outage caused by a power outage in Atlanta. At the time Reuters reported that "Airlines will likely suffer more disruptions... because major carriers have not invested enough to overhaul reservations systems based on technology dating to the 1960s." And sure enough, just last week, another "IT issue" forced United Airlines to ground all their domestic flights.
Delta also grounded 2,000 flights last summer after a computer outage caused by a power outage in Atlanta. At the time Reuters reported that "Airlines will likely suffer more disruptions... because major carriers have not invested enough to overhaul reservations systems based on technology dating to the 1960s." And sure enough, just last week, another "IT issue" forced United Airlines to ground all their domestic flights.
'Nuff said.
Alternative facts will surely prove the travel ban has been a yuge success and America is now greater than it was a week ago.
The first to go is the infrastructure as this empire rots from within.
Was it one of those that after auto-rebooting, it BSODs?
It was ransomware (a cryptolocker variant) that got the Delta computers.
and they're blaming the weather so they're not giving out hotel or food vouchers. My credit card is maxed, so this is going to be painful.
How long can the airlines go on like this? Somewhere in office buildings around the country, there are MBAs and accountants working for various airlines who have compared the cost of in-house IT with the cost of outsourcing, and they all once decided that outsourcing was best. Somehow, I doubt they've included in their calculations the true frequency (and therefore cost) of IT failures that ground the entire airline for days. As these events stack up, these guys are going to have to re-evaluate their models for predicting the frequency and severity of failures, and at some point it's going to look like a good idea to have a real IT staff on-hand to keep systems working in the first place, and to deal with it when shit hits the fan.
I'm sure that uneducated racists are great coders.
Either that or they are just compensating for their own inadequacy by spreading Trump-style lies about people who are better than them.
Americans just don't have the street-shitting skills to be coders.
This is simply a case of technical debt being piled on top technical debt. Don't blame anyone but management. Marketing screaming for more features and MBAs running a business that is a large technical enterprise. 50 years of added crap on top of crap and this is what you get, IT issues, outages, "power failures", automation issues. Each one causing tens of millions is losses. What the airline industry needs is a large IT colonic and then some good design to move forward.
You are not going to be able to fix this problem with the same thinking that got you into it.
Somewhere, there's a computer that's "Preparing to configure Windows" after it rebooted in the middle of a flight scheduling run.
Or stuck at a BIOS prompt saying "No keyboard found, press F1 to continue."
- The Sigless Wonder
Typical offended female reaction to shun the offender will not help you when he reaches in to grab your pussy.
Wow, if they are so economical (cheap) they use reservation tech from that era, maybe they'd consider hiring contractors from India to give the system an overhaul. Of course the contracting firm will probably just hand it over to a bunch of juniors who will then use techniques/tech/flaws from the 1990's, but that's still an improvement, right?
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Oh wait. Coulda sworn I just saw this one here...
Hey, uneducated cousin-fucking retard, why don't you get the fuck off the internet if you don't want to hear the truth?
Go back to your shitty small town if you prefer like-minded dimwitted retards who will pretend like you aren't a sad fucking shell of a man lashing out at those who are better than you...
Obama deployed my cousins and they got killed and now my family are all dead and I have to suck my own cock.
Maybe they should have invested in a Stratus, then their system would have stayed up for at least 24 years?
Trump deployed his tiny hands into the urine stream of an underage Russian KGB prostitute, and now he has to suck Putin's cock.
The indo-njggers have goats?? Lucky! Here in the Trumptown shanty all we have are rats and skunks.
If only they charged $300 per bag, maybe, just maybe they'd have enough funds to update their 1960s equipment?
My tongue is frozen to your mother's fr1g1d anus.
You assume people are competent enough to do that at a failing company that is only barely surviving on government bailout money. Why not just let the company fail, generating interesting news in the process, and allow a better company to replace it?
When incompetence seems to do as much damage.
I wonder how long until the airlines receive a 'modernization bailout' ^H^H^H initiative
Real Reason: They've got to slow down the planes because it's hectic this week. I'm not sure why the airports are crazy, but they are. Something must have happened this week so they have to slow down the traffic.
When will slashdot stop with all the dupes.... Wait not a dupe? Again?
As a developer, I can't imagine even bothering to answer an offer of employment from an airline these days. I spent considerable time looking for better options last year before deciding to take an offer and leave my employer of 20 years (HPE), and there were several potential employers I did avoid; work for any airline would have been a huge red flag for me. The way they've cut corners over the last few decades would definitely not make it a good place for career advancement.
I suspect the quality of their hires in IT would be limited by their reputation as employers and probably tend toward the desperate only looking to fill immediate financial needs on a temporary basis. I can't say this would lead to the most inspired work effort.
Why does it have to physically be a wall. Even 2000 years ago the Romans could build walls, it's not exactly high tech. Sensors, cameras, drones, patrol units, etc. are real 21st century technology. Gather information on the board and take action, not put a wall up that anyone with a ladder or ultralight aircraft can circumvent.
How many drug kingpins have pilots on their staff? Probably all of them.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You're a real piece of garbage.
I know a lot of guys like you, they say they're joking but it's really a passive aggressive behavior. Coward.
Desperate projects in the private sector usually turn out to be Sisyphian tasks.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
is an indian sweatshop where people dont even have fixed desks to work at. tiny ass fucking laptops. i worked there 6 months and was hamstrung by technological and beurocratic bullshit i just moved on to something else. not surprising. they like to bring in these guys from shithole countries and give them enough money to make payments on a fancy car and nice apartment then they spend 100 hours a week slaving away writing really shitty code if writing any code at all.
So, have you not actually realised that slashdot shows the linked domain beside the link? Are you stupid?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
More meetings, more stand ups, shorter sprints, a "collaborative" open office so the boss can stare at everybody all day long, code-quality measurement targets and time-reporting in quarter-hour increments. THAT will get their systems working again.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Weren't we just talking about this thing?
We may never know what happened - but airlines are coming off their holiday change freezes so I'll bet one of their releases went bad. I don't work for Delta, but I do work in the industry, including some stints at airlines. The central problem is that airlines are incredibly low-margin businesses. Yes, they charge for everything and flying is expensive, but for every last minute $1000 ticket are hundreds of people demanding the same flight for $129 and getting it, even though they barely break even on those customers. Airlines' biggest costs are fuel, labor and planes. When it comes to IT, it's just massive amounts of technical debt built on a very old core set of systems. All that customer facing tech is really driving some ancient stuff several layers deep, collecting the information and presenting it in a nice format like your phone screen. All of these abstractions, wrappers on wrappers and middleware have to work perfectly and it's a rickety tower sometimes. Also, airlines are run by MBAs who don't consider their IT a "core competency", so it either gets minimal funding or dumped off on a contractor. Often, the contractors develop stuff like the phone app or one of a billion middleware components and there are always integration issues...but the people in charge love the ability to pay someone $x to implement "that phone thing" or "the ability to do X without talking to an agent."
With all the negatives, it's a very challenging and fun environment to work in for the right kind of person. I've been doing it for 20+ years and on balance I really like it. Resourceful types do very well in airline IT, as do IT geeks who understand and care about the business they're supporting. It's extremely frustrating at times as well, and there's way more firefighting than there should be. Typical businesses will just throw money at a problem until it goes away or they run out, which is why there are so many software tool vendors and expensive hardware systems out there. Go to an airline and tell them to spend 5 million bucks, and you can forget it unless it's required for compliance, safety related or guaranteed to return an immediate increase in revenue. Unfortunately this is where the technical debt comes from because there's never enough people, and all those people are running around putting out fires all the time. If I were working for Delta right now, I guarantee I wouldn't have been sleeping for the last 24 hours as everyone tried to figure out what had gone wrong.
We need a real team of Bangalore fresh graduates to fix this problem right away according to the MBAs. Those lazy cost centers in the US screwed us again!
http://saveie6.com/
I used to work for Comair, a regional airline (now out of business) owned by Delta.
Comair was a family-owned airline operating out of Northern Kentucky just south of Cincinnati, Ohio. They were a groundbreaking airline when self-owned, and the first to go all-jet. They did fantastically well in the 90s. In the late 90s, they were purchased by Delta and largely allowed to operate independently.
Delta didn't know that the crew scheduling system was run on a pair of ancient IBM AIX systems in the data center. These were old computers that, when they were new, people were allowed to smoke in the data center. That should give you an idea of how old they were. They were also *very hard* to upgrade, and next to impossible to migrate to modern hardware. So management, or lack thereof, allowed them to keep running.
Crew Scheduling, for the uninitiated, is an important thing for an airline. In the US, the FAA has very specific rules about how long a crew (Captains, First Officers, Flight Attendants) can work in any given 24 hour period. The Crew Scheduling system ran on these old systems, and tracked the schedules of literally hundreds of pilots and flight attendants. Of course, it also had to accommodate schedule changes for each crewmember. This all came to a head in December of 2004, when the systems were 18 years old. The airline had grown larger and larger, and taken on many more crewmembers.
On Christmas Day, 2004, the scheduling system processed its 32,767th schedule change. And promptly stopped working, as the recordkeeping system (I won't call it a "database") was capable of processing a maximum of 32,767 changes due to addressing limitations. IT staff were alerted; the problem was discovered after less than an hour. There was no solution to problem, which was escalated to IT management, and then up through the executive chain until it reached Randy Rademacher, then-CEO of Comair. Rademacher made the executive decision, rightlfully, to stop operations of the airline.
Think about that for a second. He STOPPED OPERATIONS OF AN AIRLINE. ON CHRISTMAS DAY. Stranding thousands of passengers in the Cincinnati airport. (Is there a worse place to be stranded? La Guardia perhaps?)
To be fair, Rademacher was aware of the system's age. The new SBS system, with no limitation on schedule changes, was scheduled to go live in January 2005 (I worked on the project). He resigned before it went live.
They've asked them to email the issue, exception the problem is that the network is down.
How do you know who you've recognized, pray tell?
Now I know they are in Cleveland. And possibly know where they are working, especially if they spend a lot of time outside in an urban area like as a construction worker or day laborer.
Nope, Election. Done deal. The wall will be yuuuuuuge.
Sure if you want to do things the wrong way, you can base it on alternative facts instead of factual facts. Alternative facts are a lot more fun for everyone involved, due diligence is tedious.
Every security system in the world, by itself, can be circumvented, for fucks sake. What a moron.
Hopefully not as trivially as wall by using a ladder, rope, aircraft, tunnel or explosives.
If it's an actual wall like made of brick then at least it can't be circumvented with 5 minutes on a moonless night and a set of bolt cutters.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire