

Airlines Work to Catch Up to the Digital Age - edw519
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/business/05air.html?hpw

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kgrin
For all the crappiness, you do have to appreciate the difficulty and
complexity of swapping out these systems more or less on the fly.

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Groxx
Yeah, and add to that the scale of replacement, and that they need to
interoperate and their _users_ need to handle multiple versions in multiple
locations... it's a nasty problem.

I feel their pain, but I still must ask "why not earlier?". It's not an
_entirely_ unreasonable question, though I'm glad it's underway.

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ajtaylor
At the risk of being flippant, it seems obvious and the article even mentioned
it. The airlines are short of cash, and new technology on this scale is not
cheap (or quick or easy). I'd bet the airlines are big believers in "If it
ain't broke, don't fix it!"

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Groxx
And in the meantime people _like_ flying less and less, and seek alternatives.

There's the distinct possibility that the pains of flying are the _cause_ of
the shortness of cash. And given what a few choice pieces of bad press has
done to some airlines, and that updating a few things would make the problems
less likely to occur, the implication that funds have been misspent is pretty
easy to derive.

It's not cheap nor easy, I fully agree. And it sucks. But might they have done
some of the smaller things sooner, possibly preventing their downturn?

