'IT Issue' Grounded All United Airlines Flights In The US

For two and a half hours -- no take-offs. An anonymous reader quotes NBC News: All of United Airlines' domestic flights were grounded Sunday night because of a computer outage, the Federal Aviation Administration said as scores of angry travelers sounded off on social media... U.S. officials told NBC News that the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, had issues with low bandwidth. No further explanation was immediately available for what United described only as "an IT issue."
An hour ago United tweeted that they'd finally lifted the stop and were "working to get flights on their way." 66 flights were cancelled just at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, the Chicago Department of Aviation told the Associated Press, and though the article doesn't identify the total number of flights affected, "Chicago-based United Airlines and United Express operate more than 4,500 flights a day to 339 airports across five continents."

No Take offs?

[rossdee]

Well at least thats better than no landings

Re:

[Scoldog]

All planes will land eventually land, it'll just depend if the landing was survivable.

Windows 10 Auto Reboot

[zenlessyank]

Gotta love rebooting when MS wants you to reboot.

Re:

[ole_timer]

ACARS was used to track MH370's flight path curve and was used in the investigation Malaysia Air was too cheap to buy the service so more details were not available such as GPS location.

Re:

[ole_timer]

yep.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[hambone142]

I hear ya. Charging to use the overhead bin really took the cake. Add to that, no reserved seats for cheapo fares until the last minute (potentially separating you and your partner), rude folks behind the counter and rude old bags for flight attendants.

They are my last resort also. The merging of two bags of shit (American Airlines/UA) in to one large bag of shit.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

.... You do know they merged with Continental not American right? American is still its own entity and the two airline's inner workings could not be more different.

Re:

[ColdWetDog]

If you need 5 cubic feet of batteries and drugs on your flight ... well, I sure hope to hell you are having a good time.

Re:One more reason...

[dunkelfalke]

Dave Carroll [youtube.com], is that you?

What is up with airlines IT structure

[SuperKendall]

This is not the first airline this has happened to, I think now something like three airlines in about a year? How on earth do all of these separate companies have the same problems where ANY breakage of the system mean planes with schedules pre-determined ages ago cannot fly? Is there some kind of Intuit Turbo Airline Manager software they all run??

WTF!

This is probably the strongest demonstration yet that we are all living in a computer simulation.

Re:What is up with airlines IT structure

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Well, probably because this back-end system, is managed by what used to be Hewlett Packard Enterprise [hpe.com]. They've had so many layoffs, and shuffled from company to company so many times, that the people who actually know what they are doing are all long gone.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually capitalism does work. Airline accidents are at an all time low even with much higher passenger miles, costs for a ticket are accessible to most people, delays and lost luggage aren't nearly as common, and there are plenty of choices in scheduling a flight.

But you meant something else, and I proved you wrong. How does it feel to be a socialist and wrong?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Airline accidents are at an all time low
The FAA and NTSB say ... you're welcome.

Re:What is up with airlines IT structure

[dunkelfalke]

How exactly airplane accidents being at an all time low is a result of capitalism? Are you one of these crazy people who worship capitalism as a deity?
Airplane accidents don't happen that often anymore because of strict regulations and aircraft being generally more intelligent. Capitalism has directly caused a lot of accidents, like Alaska Airlines Flight 261 (airline was too cheap for proper maintenance), Turkish Airlines Flight 981 (manufacturer was too cheap to fix a known design error), American Airlines Flight 191 (again, airline too cheap to do proper maintenance), JAL Flight 123 (yep, again maintenance) and so on. Yay capitalism. Same goes for delays and lost luggage, by the way. Strict regulations making it difficult for the airlines to weasel themselves out have helped, not capitalism.

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

It was more or less comparable if we consider aircraft from the same era - it would be dishonest comparing today's accident rates with the rates of the 1970ies, no matter which aircraft. The reasons, however, were quite different - pilot errors and general technical backwardness were the most prominent reasons - soviet passenger aircraft was technically about a decade behind. Soviet aircraft designed shortly before the breakup (Il-96, Tu-204) caught up and are generally about as safe as western aircraft and

Re:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Capitalism is a vengeful God. It will smite any corporation that kills people in pursuit of profits, .... eventually, ... once it becomes readily visible to all consumers that "this company will kill to make a few cents", and in the meantime its competitors who tried to be safe would have been undercut and driven to bankruptcy... The CXOs would have cashed in their stock options and unloaded the stock on to a bunch of chumps holding worthless stock....

Yay! For capitalism.

But in reality, these morons wou

Re:

[tomhath]

There are many different forms of capitalism. The most common is what's known as a mixed economy [wikipedia.org]. It works quite well here in the US.

Got another accident for your list

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

You can possibly add Air France 447 to that list. Air France chose not to replace the air speed indicators until the plane returned to France on what would be its last flight. The passengers and crew lost that gamble. I have no inside knowledge as to whether that was for cost reasons, lack of training in Rio where they simply didn't know how to do the job there, or control freak reasons (I worked for a French company and until you actually work for them you really have no idea how much of a control freak

Re:

[WhiplashII]

However the true cause of the crash was actually nepotism. The copilot that caused the crash (by continually stalling the plane until it hit the water) was not the best for the job, he just had the best connections. He did not know that continuously pulling back on the stick would stall/crash the plane.

Of course, the real root cause of the crash was that there was no obvious feedback that he was pulling back on the stick. The PIC did not know he was doing that until he mentioned it right before impact, b

Re:

[tlhIngan]

However the true cause of the crash was actually nepotism. The copilot that caused the crash (by continually stalling the plane until it hit the water) was not the best for the job, he just had the best connections. He did not know that continuously pulling back on the stick would stall/crash the plane.

Of course, the real root cause of the crash was that there was no obvious feedback that he was pulling back on the stick. The PIC did not know he was doing that until he mentioned it right before impact, by w

Re:

[dunkelfalke]

Dude, you are preaching to the choir here - that is exactly what I have written.

Re:

[dbIII]

One amusing thing that happened near me was an airport IT failure not an airline one. Several airports under the same owner in different states ended up with all baggage handling operations run from one site. So when the obvious happened and two backhoe incidents took out both connections one airport had baggage conveyors that could not be operated either locally or manually.
If someone put all these recent airline/airport failures in a book and sent it back to 1970 they would think it was a satire.

Re:What is up with airlines IT structure

[dbIII]

What you attach to a backhoe is your own business.

Re:What is up with airlines IT structure

[im_thatoneguy]

How on earth do all of these separate companies have the same problems where ANY breakage of the system mean planes with schedules pre-determined ages ago cannot fly?

Because all of them depend on software to handle their flight scheduling. Imagine this scenario: a plane lands 30 minutes late into Denver with 200 passengers. 50 of them will now miss their flight. Those 50 passengers are going to set off a cascade of modifications automatically to hundreds of dependencies. No human being can keep thousands of flights and millions of passengers in their head at once. There used to be a lot more slop in the system and margin for error. Now a plane delayed landing is almost certainly a plane delayed departing. The entire system has to minimize the damage by deciding whether it makes sense to delay a handful of flights to ensure they make it or attempt to accommodate them on later flights. And if they delay those later flights how will that impact all of the passengers on those flights, etc etc etc. What about that storm in Chicago which will undoubtedly delay any aircraft who don't leave *now*? There are millions of variables and millions of dependencies and if the satellite tracking system goes down suddenly the system won't know if a plane is going to be on-time or if it'll be an hour late. The only safe conclusion is to just stop all traffic until everything is sorted.

When you stop and think about it an Airline's IT system *IS* the company's day-to-day/minute-to-minute management. So if part of the system goes down in one region that will affect the whole system since a passenger currently in Tokyo very well may be flying to Singapore on a plane arriving from Denver. It's a global network of millions of interdependent pieces.

Many airlines are taking measures to minimize these impacts. It used to be that a plane would leave New York, arrive in Chicago, leave Chicago, arrive in Phoenix, leave Phoenix arrive in Seattle, stay for the night and work its way backwards. If the plane was delayed along any stop everything would get delayed. Airlines are trying to reroute their networks so that a plane just circulates back and forth between 1-2 places in a day.

Re:

[atheos]

forget playing Chess, Poker and Go - This is the problem that AI needs to be solving.

Re:

[SuperKendall]

I'm not sure about that - the 50 missing flights may not be able to re-book, but the original flights will still fly roughly on time, to the same places. Individual cabin crews know what the passenger count is to let more people on or not. There's nothing about an iT shutdown that SHOULD have to cause a complete failure of all planes to fly.

Re:

[Tisha_AH]

ACARS has several component systems; some are common to all airlines and others are unique to each particular carrier. At its simplest form it provides very basic information regarding the status of a flight (takeoff, landing, gate departures and arrivals) and in-flight weather information (making each plane in to a temporary weather station).

Some air carriers use ACARS for much more comprehensive functions like monitoring the status of equipment on aircraft in flight (maintenance scheduling), passenger inf

Re:

[Eristone]

Bwahahahahhahaha....

Wait. You were serious. Let me laugh louder...

BWAHAHAHAHHAH.... HAHHAHA....HAH....

Anonymous Coward who started computing sometime after 2008 and has no memory of the history of why things are done the way they are done. Either that or someone working on their MBA and ..well, there goes that history statement again.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn off your phone and go for a curry.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is true. ACARS is about as low bandwidth as it gets. Pretty robust in terms of demod too. It uses AFSK, so simple correlater is used to detect the ones and zeros for the bit slicer. Can't imagine how the problem could be anything to do with bandwidth... 8-bit microcontroller could easily decode it.

ACARS security

[aberglas]

So, what type of encryption did they use in the 1970s? My guess is none at all.

ACARS must have become a critical component. Otherwise they would have just taken off without it. Used the voice radio instead. If it is critical, is it secured? Nope.

(Voice communication is also unsecured, and idiots with VHS radios have occasionally caused nuisance. But voice is between human beings who can generally figure out what is going on.)

Re:

[Zak3056]

idiots with VHS radios have occasionally caused nuisance.

To be fair, the replacement radios are in Beta.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Actually this is a genuine issue with the shear number of aircraft in the sky. Radio systems have issues with hidden transmitters, that is if you have two aircraft who both want to send a message at the same time but can't hear each other they both start transmitting, and a receiver in the middle hears both simultaneously and neither is intelligible. It's particularly bad with wifi, and now air traffic is getting the same problem.

As things get busy the problem is amplified by re-transmissions, additional me

Problems delivering bandwidth intensive data?

[khz6955]

@nimbius [slashdot.org]: "so you're complaining that a 60wpm VHF-based system from the late seventies that was never designed for high bandwidth communication beyond 300 baud, has problems delivering bandwidth intensive data?

Why would local congestion take out all of United Airlines' domestic flights? I suspect the problem occured at the centeralized message routing system. Which apparently doesn't come with any build-in failure modes.

Who IS John Galt?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

And is that question scribbled on airport walls country wide?

Children of the Magenta

[Anonymous Coward]

The children of the magenta have taken over the airlines, and now the op specs won't let us hand jam the flight data in. This is, of course, fucking retarded, because all airline pilots are completely capable, competent, and routinely train to flying these things by hand, using reversionary navigation. I can, indeed, fly the 'Bus across the ocean without ACARS, without GPS, without the computer figuring out takeoff and landing data, and without datalink weather. The airplane is actually well designed, and t

Nervous?

[Vinegar Joe]

"There's no reason to become alarmed, and we hope you'll enjoy the rest of your flight. By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?" - Elaine Dickinson

and once again, cutting corners in IT backfires

[Indy1]

I love reading when a company that is critical dependent on their IT infrastructure to function, cuts as many corners (and jobs) as possible in IT to save a buck, then has it all blow up in their face.

Target, Home Depot, United, Yahoo, etc.....they'll save millions, until they end up losing billions.

Apollo System?

[AlanObject]

Is United still using the Apollo system on IBM 370 mainframes? Last time I paid any attention to it that's what they were doing.

Re:It's not Russia, it's the squirrels

[BlueStrat]

Squirrels cause more damage to infrastructure than humans and natural disasters. No joke. NSA even acknowledged it. http://cybersquirrel1.com/ [cybersquirrel1.com]

Nyet!

Moose and Squirrel sold out and are now double-agents working for Dear Leader!

Strat

obligatory...

[mbaGeek]

did they try turning it off and then back on?

In other words ...

[CaptainDork]

... had issues with low bandwidth ...

DDoS.

Somewhere

[quantaman]

A software developer reaaally doesn't want to come in to work on Monday.

Re:

[archilochus]

Anyone else remember this (yes, I'm that old): http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-01-31 [dilbert.com]

Many Guitars were saved...

[REden]

Many Guitars were saved.. because we all know United Breaks Guitars.

Low bandwidth

[Ed Tice]

I hope that somebody who has worked on these systems will comment here. ACARS is a satellite-based system and I don't think that each airline has their own satellite. So how is it that this only affected United and not everybody? Something doesn't add up here. There are a lot of snarky comments here but on-board aircraft software doesn't get updated en mass. The only thing I can really think of is that the ground-based IT systems were unable to process ACARS data. But that wouldn't be for bandwidth-related issues!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

ACARS is not satellite. The transmitting system is on each aircraft and sends out short telemetry messages using very narrow, low bandwidth, AFSK modulation in the clear. Not to be confused with the other telemetry on all of these planes called ADS-B. ADS-B sends out GPS location, velocity, ID.

Re:

[Ed Tice]

This is a great post. Wish I could mode it up. Can you confirm or refudiate this part of Wikipedia >Because the ACARS network is modeled after the point-to-point telex network, all messages come to a central processing location to be routed Even though it's not satellite, it still seems to be shared infrastructure that should affect everybody equally unless it is the final ground link.

The Repsonse

[Murdoch5]

Take all of those whinny little travelers and reply back: "If you think it's easy keeping computer systems up, running and online for US wide air traffic control, please submit your resume or shutup!"

ACARS and NextGen ATC

[PilotKnob]

From what I've gleaned from the measly information dripping out our way, the basis of the NextGen ATC system is going to be based on ACARS. This scares me greatly, as ACARS in my experience in using it over the past decade is that it's utterly unreliable. "ACARS NO COMM" is seen in the MCDU scratchpad far more than any other message. They better have a super-duper improved communication network ready for this, or I'm calling it right now - it's a dead-in-the-water system if it attempts to use today's utt

IT issue?

[mu51c10rd]

Did they turn it off and on again?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-sequitor. We haven't nuked anything, and not for events much more egregious than preventing takeoffs of a single major airline which experienced a rather trivial IT outage - the type of thing that has happened all-too-often at the airlines without any outside interference.

You missed the sarcasm.

Under 8 years of Obama, the US completely ignored hacking by China and Russia - China stole the entire OPM database of cleared US government workers, and Obama did nothing. No response at all.

Hell, Obama knew about Russian hacking of the DNC last summer - and did nothing. Why the hell do you think the Russians thought they could get away with hacking the DNC? Because Obama had let it happen for years.. Obama didn't even bother with some bogus "red line" threat of retaliation.

"OMG

Re:

[ole_timer]

Obama said the OPM hacking of the SF86's was "allowable espionage" - he reacted, but in the way we wanted... He was way too late on Russia and thus ineffective...

Re:

[AvitarX]

I'd think getting Saudi Arabia to pump more oil was all that needed to be done.

You don't think Putin is aware that his behavior and that are related? You don't think that's why he wanted to make sure there wasn't a democrat in office?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that Trump is President, the entire US Government will be flying on his new "discount" airline, Trumpoflot, and all of the profits will be donated back to the US government. Mysteriously, the airline never seems to make a profit. But at least the prices are low, the lowest ever, and anybody presenting "alternative facts" is a clearly a Nazi.

Clearly a Nazi.

Re:Must be Russia

[lucm]

Good thing Obama is no longer president, or we would be nuking Russia for their "hacking" of a US airline...

It would never happen. They would just call the Scorpion guy and get him to rollback a buggy Windows Update like he did at LAX in 2014.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Only pro TRUMP posts have the high quality we need to Make Slashdot Great Again.

Heil Trumpler!!!