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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.
In fact, to enhance upon my reply from a few minutes ago, it appears that in 2006, Delta outsourced its IT operations to IBM [1]. It was a seven year agreement, so I don't know who does it now. But I doubt it's Delta.
Assuming this is still the situation: I don't know on what continent Delta's IT people are stationed at this point, but that's hardly the issue. The issue is, wherever they are, they aren't competently managing Delta's IT infrastructure. They had a similarly airline-grounding outage in August, about six months ago.
If management were able to recognize the value of investment in IT, they could have taken steps over the years to develop a system that isn't this fragile. Presumably, back in 2006, when they went into bankruptcy, someone convinced them that IT wasn't a "core competency" because it would save the airline a bunch of money to outsource it. Since then, they've been accumulating tech debt because nobody at HQ actually owns IT anymore... they think it's just a service that they pay for. It doesn't appear to be working out for them.
[1] http://www.informationweek.com...?
For more information, the airlines are running on TPF from IBM. IBM still updates it, so it's not ancient, and it runs on beefy modern hardware. IBM claims it's extremely stable, fwiw. However, the airlines have built up a lot of systems around it, like their online booking services, for example, and they have some middleware that they seem to have written themselves to interface with TPF. The middleware and front end systems seem to have synchronization issues.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.