Travel Required by Work

[CajunCenturion]

When work requires that you travel, consider this obstacle:
Airline Computer Systems

Good Luck
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To get the most from your Tek-Tips experience, please read FAQ181-2886
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[chiph]

Bruce Schneier is upset at the AP in taking his quote out of context:

"If this kind of thing could happen by accident, what would happen if the bad guys did this on purpose?" he said.

He said the way they used it does nothing but promote fear-mongering:

I'm sure I said that, but I wish the reporter hadn't used it. It's just the sort of fear-mongering that I object to when others do it.

Also - The reporter has forgotten his computer history. American Airline's SABRE network is what allowed the airlines to grow to the size they are today, as well as pioneered real-time transactional computer systems. So saying things like:

"Obviously, the airlines have become way too dependent on computers," said Terry Trippler, an airline industry expert in Minneapolis. "Imagine a computer glitch and all the Wal-Mart stores across the country shut down, (founder) Sam (Walton) would come out of his grave."

is irresponsible.

The problem is that ComAir simply didn't plan for the system to fail. All computers fail -- anyone who's had to replace a hard drive knows this. The difference is that if you're a billion dollar corporation whose business depends on their computer systems, you take steps to ensure failure of one system doesn't cause you to lose business. Walmart certainly plans for this -- there are rumors of a data center buried deep in the hills of Arkansas that is serving as their hot-site.

There was a poster on Slashdot who claimed to have worked at ComAir, and said their crew selection system was just ripe for a failure like this -- it had no redundancy, was running on outdated hardware, and on J2EE portal software which was no longer supported by the vendor. And worst of all -- the company had no plans to replace it. So if all that he said were true, then ComAir deserves everything that's coming to them.

Chip H.

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If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first

 

[chiph]

More info from Slashdot:

The computer system in question runs AIX. The box itself is still up and running just fine; this is purely an application error. This application was not written in-house at Comair, but by another large aerospace company -- SBS (

http://www.sbsint.com/

[sbsint.com], owned by Boeing.) This bit of software does not use an external database, it tracks everything itself. It is a dedicated system responsible only for flight crew assignments. (The blather in the original submission about passenger reservations is way off-base. Those functions are handled by a completely different system.)

The great majority of Comair's traffic flows through the midwest, and the central base of operations is in Cincinnati. The midwest was hit by a major snowstorm this week, causing many, many crew reassignments. It appears right now that the application in question has a hard limit of 32,000 changes per month (ouch). Consider that Comair runs 1,100 flights a day and there are usually 3 crew members on each aircraft. A big storm like this can cause problems for days after the snow stops falling. That's a whole lot of crew changes.

In Comair's defense, this has never happened before and is unlikely to happen again. The crew system was already on the chopping block long before this incident, with its replacement scheduled to go live in January. If this freak storm had happened a month later, this likely never would have occurred.

Chip H.

____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first