Slashdot Mirror
Delta Computer Glitches Force Flight Halts Third Year In a Row (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The U.S. airline grounded all domestic flights Tuesday to deal with a technology issue that affected some of its systems. About an hour later, Delta said it had restored all its systems, allowing the services to resume. While the carrier said there were no disruptions or safety issues with any flight, the systems failure was the third in as many years that forced Delta to shut its operations. In January last year, a 2 1/2-hour computer breakdown grounded domestic flights. Delta's worldwide computer systems failed in August 2016, causing massive cancellations. This time, international flights weren't affected, and the grounding was relatively short. Still, with limited updates on flight schedules, irate customers took to social media.
I'm not surprised, although I keep thinking that the massive amounts of money Delta loses due to IT failures would be enough incentive to bring their IT infrastructure back under their control. Since 2016, Delta's CIO, Rahul Samant, has been working to move IT employees out of Delta into Indian IT consultancies (see http://www.fox9.com/news/delta...).
It seems to me that airlines basically have four things of real value: aircraft, ground crews to maintain the aircraft, flight crews to operate the aircraft, and an IT system that allows them to schedule and dispatch the aircraft. When an airline talks about its "core competencies," I feel like their IT system should definitely be one, because if it fails, the planes don't fly. That seems like enough reason to not offshore that part of the business.
Is that what they use? "Annual human sacrifice" AKA maintenance contract.
IME AS/400s sit in the corner working and getting dustier and dustier until management decide to stop paying annual maintenance.
"Geez, why are we paying this much every year? Damn things never go down, we can skip it this year"
And BINGO! HDD failure - which,as an ad-hoc service call, will cost ~{annual maintenance$$$} to fix.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom