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Transportation IT

'IT Issue' Grounded All United Airlines Flights In The US (nbcnews.com) 117

Posted by EditorDavid from the no-fly-zone dept.
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."
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'IT Issue' Grounded All United Airlines Flights In The US More

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

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  • No Take offs? (Score:4, Funny)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Sunday January 22, 2017 @11:13PM (#53718475)

    Well at least thats better than no landings

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Scoldog ( 875927 )
      All planes will land eventually land, it'll just depend if the landing was survivable.

  • Windows 10 Auto Reboot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Sunday January 22, 2017 @11:24PM (#53718525)

    Gotta love rebooting when MS wants you to reboot.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • 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: (Score:1)

        by 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:One more reason... (Score:4, Funny)

      by dunkelfalke ( 91624 ) on Monday January 23, 2017 @05:53AM (#53719521)

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

  • What is up with airlines IT structure (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday January 22, 2017 @11:29PM (#53718555)

    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by l0n3s0m3phr34k ( 2613107 ) on Sunday January 22, 2017 @11:35PM (#53718583)
      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: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      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 (Score:4)

      by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Monday January 23, 2017 @05:16AM (#53719463)

      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: (Score:2)

        by atheos ( 192468 )
        forget playing Chess, Poker and Go - This is the problem that AI needs to be solving.

      • 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.

    • 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

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 23, 2017 @12:05AM (#53718681)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 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.

      • 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: (Score:2)

          by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

          idiots with VHS radios have occasionally caused nuisance.

          To be fair, the replacement radios are in Beta.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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

    • @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.

  • And is that question scribbled on airport walls country wide?

  • Children of the Magenta (Score:1)

    by 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? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Vinegar Joe ( 998110 ) on Monday January 23, 2017 @12:41AM (#53718787)

    "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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Indy1 ( 99447 ) on Monday January 23, 2017 @12:48AM (#53718803)

    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.

  • 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.

  • did they try turning it off and then back on?

  • ... had issues with low bandwidth ...

    DDoS.

  • Somewhere (Score:3)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Monday January 23, 2017 @02:15AM (#53719043)

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

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

  • Low bandwidth (Score:3)

    by Ed Tice ( 3732157 ) on Monday January 23, 2017 @04:24AM (#53719335)
    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: (Score:1)

      by 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.

      • 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.
  • 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!"

  • 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

  • Did they turn it off and on again?

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