United Airlines Passengers Stranded By Computer Outage

From reader Peter McDermott comes word of a computer outage with effects to dwarf those of the one that stranded thousands of US Airways passengers last week. This time, it's United Airlines' systems that are out of commission and unable to handle passenger reservations, leaving passengers stranded all over the U.S. According to Peter, experiencing the resultant delays first-hand at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., United planes are being sent on — along with their passengers' luggage — to the cities from which they're to leave tomorrow morning, in anticipation of the computer system being fixed in the interim.

Not the RES system, but the CKI system

[Anonymous Coward]

Airline mainframe of the size of an United are usually separated in several backends. One for the Reservation/Inventory & Ticketing and Scheduling, another for the OPS, check In, Weight and balance. Sometiems even more mainframe. Basically when you "book" you add your own PNR (passenger Name Recvord) to the invetory system thru the reservation system, this can happens directly with the airline own system, or a GDS system (think travel agency using Amadeus / Sabre), once the sales is done the ticketing system (for the own airline ticket stocks / travel agency use IATA stocks) generate the ticket, in the past paper ticket, nowaday mostly etickets. After that shortly before departure (24h to 28h) the RES system send the PNL (passenger Name List) to the GHS (groudn Handler system, can also be the airline own check in system, but can be a special firm asked to do it, airport systems, or a partner airline, for example United is checked-in by Lufthansa in Frankfurt, and vice versa the Check in is done by United for Lufthansa in the US) that GH system usually when it receives the PNL get the ticket ferom the ticketing database (either directly thru an itnern link, or using edifact message , namely the TKCREQ ground handling message).


The reason I doubt this was the RES system, is that this would mean there would be *NO SALES* or *BOOKING* if it weas the RES system, where as flight would continueb to operate for 24h about. Whereas here the flight stopperd, but nothing is said about sales stopping. Therefore I can see a number of sub system stopping working : WAB, but for those usually you can have load sheets as work around, and unless the UA agent are kept dumb, they have that as work around. That could be MES , messaging, where the message (PNL & Edifact) don't go reach the GH place, but it is doubtful as this would mean that the glitch was yesterday.

That leaves the check in system glitching , or the OPS system (the one handling the scheduled departure of flights). Seeing that the picture is a picture of a MANUAL boarding pass , I tend to think this was the check in system which failed. Anotehr evidence that this is the CHeck in of UA which failed and not the RES system , si that other origin which are NOT ground handled by UA , like FRA are working. Only the local check in from UA seems to be impacted.

There are naturally work around that for a short time (manual boarding pass, paper PNL and check list) but those are short stop gp measure. I can imagine UA sending pax in hotel and getting this corrected / solved during the night.



That was a little nitpick : RES from UA did not break, almost certainly CKI from UA broke (check in). That is as much a difference as Amazon warehouse and sales breaking , or their delivery service breaking. That said for the stranded Pax : no difference probably.

Re:Hard to make sense of that.

[AmigaMMC]

Are the passengers getting their luggage shipped in the planes and not allowed to board or what's happening? As far as I know sending a plane with luggage for a passenger that hasn't boarded is against FAA rules.

Confusion...

Not true, I work in the airline industry at an airport. The bag cannot be sent ahead of passenger by law only on international flights; on domestic flights it's not illegal to send a bag on a different flight, just not preferred.