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Airlines Suffer Worldwide Delays After Global Booking System Fails (bloomberg.com)
rastos1 writes: Airlines worldwide were forced to delay flights Thursday as a global flight-bookings system operated by Amadeus IT Group SA suffered what the company called a "network issue." Major carriers including British Airways, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Cathay Pacific Airways and Qantas Airways were among those reportedly impacted by the outage. Singapore's Changi airport said via Twitter that a technical issue affecting some operators was delaying the check-in process, with boarding passes having to be issued manually. "Amadeus confirms that, during the morning, we experienced a network issue that caused disruption to some of our systems," the Madrid-based company said in a statement. Technical teams took immediate action to identify the cause of the issue and services are "gradually being restored," it said.
I can't believe this hasn't even been addressed on Slashdot. The site was completely down for two days and they're trying to pretend like nothing happened.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I agree, unfortunately by today's standards, the waterfall approach has it's limitations with respect to time to market and R&D costs. SABRE finally did make it away from the mainframe centric architecture (some time in the later 90's) and thus could adopt more modern life cycle management techniques.
On another note, the SABRE system (American Airlines) was in fact a system that was comprised of the core system originated by Eastern Airlines (named System One) back in the late 70's, early 80's. SABRE and System One added functionality to market these two separate systems to travel agencies who previously had to use telephones to call into an airline reservation centers. System One was later branched off of Eastern Airlines into a separate entity under Continental Holding Co. before Eastern went bankrupt in the early 90's and was later sold to Amadeus. SABRE is still SABRE as far as I know, however Amadeus was the original purchase of System One.
And how do I know this? That was my first job that got me started down the path of computers as well as my distaste for COBOL after C was standardized in 89.
There were actually 4 big ones marketed to the travel industry back in the late 80's
PARS (TWA)
SABRE (American)
DatasII (Delta)
System One (Eastern)
There were other airlines that utilized similar system, Pan Am had "Panamac" ( I think), Continental/America West/Alaska Airlines had "Shares".