
United Airlines Domestic Flights Grounded for 2 Hours by Computer Outage - perseusprime11
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/all-united-airlines-domestic-flights-grounded-computer-outage-n710596
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rm999
The US airline industry has a serious problem with these outages. By my count,
4 major airlines have been hit with system-wide computer-related outages in
the last year (southest, jetblue, delta, united).

This article goes into some detail of why it happens:
[http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/08/technology/delta-airline-
com...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/08/technology/delta-airline-computer-
failure). It seems like human error and fragile computer systems are the
biggest issues.

~~~
JoshuaJB
If the datacenters are really too complex for the people running them to
understand, I would expect failures like this to drive the airlines towards
AWS, Azure, or some similar service.

~~~
nodesocket
I'm not advocating that it is ok, but I am sure these airline systems are
super old and wouldn't be surprised if they use IBM DB2 or similar ancient
database technology. Moving to the cloud is not a trivial task for these sorts
of mission critical antiquated systems.

~~~
eplanit
It's a legacy story like none other, in fact. The predecessor/origins of SABRE
is IBM's Airline Control Program (ACP). When I worked for IBM years ago I
heard many stories of how difficult it was to try an modernize to a newer
system because of absurd complexity, but just as much because the whole
airline industry became so inextricably bound to the legacy:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Airline_Control_Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Airline_Control_Program)

~~~
madeofpalk
I'm currently doing consulting work for That Major Australian Airline and,
while I'm rather high up the stack, you do get a sense of the amount of legacy
that's built into everything and the monumental effort it would be to migrate
all this old stuff to newer infra. I mean, AFAICT there's no database/service
to _query_ flights - you have to register a web hook to receive flight data
and store it yourself.

New projects are cloud-first, and more and more stuff gets migrated or
replaced with equivalents which run in whatever cloud provider. But I can't
even imagine how the replacements for all these old legacy services would go
down.

~~~
pbarnes_1
They used to run on Tandem NonStops with a dual DC setup in Sydney and
Newcastle. Those were the days.

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ngoldbaum
Currently sitting on a plane at O'Hare, can't get to gate because they won't
let any planes leave to clear a spot for my plane. What a nightmare.

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erubin
I have no reason to believe that there's any malice involved here.

I also think that incidents like this might become more common as the state of
cyber warfare progresses. As engineers, we should take care to build secure
software, especially when that software underlies important systems. We should
impress upon non-technical management the importance of doing so, even if it
may take a little more time or money in the short term.

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stevenhubertron
Waiting in SLC terminal. Crew has to be off the clock in an hour. Not likely
getting home tonight.

~~~
teej
I got stuck in SLC two Sundays ago. Hotel tonight should have decent options.
If you end up in town, the place will be dead. Bourbon House is decent and
serves food late.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Isn't Sundance going on now? That might overflow into SLC?

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mactyler
Stuck on ground in plane at ORD, just got an update that the "mainframes" are
starting to come back online.

EDIT: We're now about to take off.

~~~
hindsightbias
Uh, they aren't using mainframes.

10:1, Linux fail.

~~~
pc86
They most certainly are. The primary systems running all the major US airlines
are all mainframe at least in part.

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fapjacks
This doesn't surprise me. US airlines seem like breeding grounds for
management silos and the technology is going to reflect that, no matter how
much you spend.

~~~
shados
When's the last time you heard a great software/IT engineer go "You know what
I really want to do? Work for an Airlines company. It will be sweet!"

Yeah, that's part of the problem.

~~~
acchow
No, the problem is the airlines don't compensate or treat their engineers well
enough to make anyone think "I really want to work for an airline".

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falcolas
May this never happen to the Tesla fleet. As hesitant as I am about self
driving cars, this would be an almost irreparable setback.

And it's happened twice in my recent memory to our air fleets...

~~~
viraptor
Why would it happen? Teslas are not centrally managed / scheduled / booked.

The planes themselves could fly - it's the other things that failed.

~~~
falcolas
They are centrally managed, though. They are authorized to run over the Tesla
network, and they get patches from a centralized source.

Theoretically the cars would be mechanically sound to drive, but couldn't due
to problems with the software.

