Computer Glitch Friday Grounded US Airways Flights

mschaffer writes "A computer glitch Friday night snarled the travel plans of US Airways customers, as reports flooded in of flights grounded around the country." As someone stranded for several hours yesterday by this outage, "glitch" seems like quite a euphemism. With outgoing flights blocked, and new ones arriving full of passengers expecting to meet connections, the atmosphere got a little heated. Customers could see nice weather, and planes lined up outside, but "The System Is Down" trumps all. The E concourse at Charlotte (a US Airways hub) was packed full of customers ranging from livid (a handful) to merely angry (most) to calmly resigned — which means those of us with seats, snacks, and books or computers. It was disheartening to see how brittle is the infrastructure the airline employs; with the part of the system visible to airline employees down, customers thought they might get more information, or even rebooking, through the US Airways website. But that was down, too, and all the desk staff could do is shrug.

umm...

[datapharmer]

that sucks. No backup paper system in place? Can't they just read what the tickets say such as flight and seat number? They know where the flights are going as most are routine. It seems they should have been able to get *some* flights in the air.

Re:umm...

[linest]

You can't fly unless you can prove your aircraft has had all required maintenance done. There are also rules about the number of hours per day crew members are allowed to be in the air. I suspect these records could be printed and used if it were a planned outage but this wasn't.

Could you tell the difference?

[Cutriss]

As I am now located in proximity to an airport with a US Airways "service focus" and have had the "pleasure" of flying with them several times, I have to ask - how would you be able to tell the difference? Every time I've been in a US Airways terminal, there's always a significant number of non-weather-related delays and cancellations (compared to the other airlines' monitors). My wife and I have independently had three separate incidents this year where we were 4th and inches from having to stay overnight at an airport due to cancellations/late planes/overbooked crew/etc. In two of those cases, I had flights where we took off at the 2'55" mark, just shy of the three hour requirement to return to gate and let everyone off. The cynic in me suspects that US Airways is actually using that three hour window to plan its flights.

It's an abhorrent mess, and when I see the US Airways CEO defending against his last place customer service ranking, I have to wonder just how much denial one management team can stand.

Re:umm...

[FlyingGuy]

In 1960 most everyone was running Sabre [wikipedia.org]

Most everything was connected to hard lines that went back to the big main frame machines that ran it.

If one terminal was down then it was most likely the terminal that had failed or possibly one of hundreds of hard lines back to the Main Frame

Now days with everything being all cloudy good luck figuring out what might still be available. It could have been something as simple as the single bit of fiber serving that main concourse was damaged or a router someplace in the airport had failed or some cloud vendors routing had gone south or hell it might have been something as dramatic as what happened to Amazon a little bit ago.

Re:umm...

[Deadstick]

Rent an amusing sf film made in 1953 called "The Magnetic Monster" and watch an airport official tell Richard Carlson "We can't search ALL the flights. This is Los Angeles International; we have over a dozen departures a day!"

rj