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Delta Airlines Cancels Thousands of Flights after Crew-Scheduling Computer Crash

posted by martyb on Sunday April 09 2017, @05:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-for-the-computers-to-crash-than-the-planes dept.

McGruber writes:

Delta Airlines began cancelling thousands of its flights on Wednesday, April 5, 2017, blaming the resulting delays on thunderstorms at its Atlanta hub (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/business/delta-flights-canceled.html). The airline still has not recovered as of Saturday, April 8 — already this morning, Delta has cancelled another 275 flights.

The resulting chaos at airports has been extensively documented in a flyertalk thread (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta-air-lines-skymiles/1834788-april-5-2017-delta-cancels-300-flights-due-thunderstorm.html). The thread contains pictures of people sleeping on airport floors, reports of 20-40 hour call wait times, and claims that Delta's crew-scheduling computers have crashed. In a thread at Airline Pilot Forums (http://www.11alive.com/news/local/long-lines-reported-saturday-morning-at-atlanta-airport/429759800), Delta employees are posting about waiting for work and not being called in.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 09 2017, @07:10PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 09 2017, @07:10PM (#491237)

    Almost every time I see one of these articles, specifics about WHAT software/hardware is at the heart of the problem is omitted.

    * If the OS is an element in the failure (e.g. poor security; easily pwned), include that.
    * The NAME of the software app/suite would be interesting.
    (Repeated occurrences of the -same- name would be a significant indicator.)
    * Who maintains the stuff?
    The customer/user/company itself? How big is the support staff? Can personnel be reassigned to this problem?
    Is the vendor of the stuff maintaining it?
    Does a subcontractor maintain it?
    * Was there a recent update/upgrade/change to the underlying system or was it just a failure of data input personnel?
    * Was it a hardware failure and was that actually weather-related or attributable to a specific event/circumstance?

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  • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Sunday April 09 2017, @07:18PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Sunday April 09 2017, @07:18PM (#491250)

    If it's big and there's an outage, IBM is almost guaranteed to be involved, likely with one of their lovely mainframes. Good reliable hardware, but historically running OSes that seem to actually *encourage* user error. The only way to actually keep their uptimes as good as they can be is to never change anything, the mainframe motto.

    Not that I'm bitter.