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.

Comments

And I'm sure their CEO will get a massive raise

[Indy1]

while cutting infrastructure spending and outsourcing IT positions in a mad attempt to make his/her stock options go through the roof.

Rinse, Lather, Repeat

Still not surprised, but a little confused

[imidan]

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.

Re: Still not surprised, but a little confused

[mhotchin]

Knock on effects. Oops, missed your connecting flight. Oops, flight crew is now over hours, have to get another one. Oops, flight didn't make it, so the flight out of the destination is hooped as well.

Re: Still not surprised, but a little confused

[DarkOx]

Don't forget if any busier airports are involved and you miss your window the ATC delay. Detla plays A LOT of games to make their ontime and cancellation numbers look a lot better than they are too. I have laterally had a 4pm flight be delayed for 8 hours while later flights to the same destination took off because it was better to screw the ~150 of us for the better part of a whole day to keep their later flights from figuring negatively into their ontime states.

Usually this does not happen because its the same plane being turned around and used for the later flights; but when its not watch out.

Re:Still not surprised, but a little confused

[bobbied]

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.

How cute that you think airlines actually OWN the airplanes they fly or actually have the necessary people to fully maintain them. Many aircraft are leased and most of the maintenance work is done by contractors and many times on foreign soil. Also, the airline business is one of managing debt and cash flow, often it's a race to cut costs faster than your competition to keep fares low and profit margins up.

Re: Still not surprised, but a little confused

[commodore64_love]

In the 2017 software crash they had to cancel 150 flights. Figure $200 per set, that's 4.3 million dollars (gross loss). In 2016 they canceled over 1000 flights, so that's 28.8 million (gross).

- Since the planes didn't fly the actual loss is less (no fuel burned, no hours paid to stewards/pilots, etc).

Outsourcing to India reduces salary cost from $113,000 to $9000 per engineer. I don't know how many engineers Delta IT uses? 1000 maybe?

DELTA SAVES $104 million in labor costs.

Joe vs. the Volcano

[mentil]

They neglected the annual human sacrifice to the AS/400 gods.

Re:Joe vs. the Volcano

[dwywit]

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.

Re:Result of third world labor

[dwywit]

Jeez, I'm gonna have to start browsing at +2, if posts like this keep getting +1.

Hint: follow the money. It's *always* about the money.

Re:Delta is just another company on this line of f

[omnichad]

And if you're already going to do a bad job, outsourcing starts to make sense. No realisation that it might have value to do a good job.