Database Glitch Grounds American/US Airways 274
An anonymous reader writes "According to numerous news sources, all American Airlines and US Airways flights were grounded for two or three hours this morning. Both problems were caused by a computer glitch in the systems hosted by EDS. Quote: The operating system that drives the airline's flight plans went down."
EDS (Score:3, Interesting)
EDS? Quelle surprise. (Score:5, Interesting)
EDS, in cahoots with the UK govenment, have wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers money on failed IT projects. Notable ones include the Inland Revenue (UK IRS), Child Support Agency (£50M over budget and still not working) and an email and directory service for the NHS (withdrew at last minute allowing C&W to steal at a much inflated price).
Though the blame cannot completely be laid at the door of EDS, the government has been guilty of sloppy auditing and the worst being the willingness to hand over extra money when EDS has come around with the begging bowl.
My guess ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not Smart Enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the efficiencies of a computerized business offset the cost of short downtimes, and the business is able to grow to the complexity that it isn't worth running without the computer. A 2 or 3 hour stoppage once in a blue moon (that was last month, and it looked big) might not be worth working around.
All the same I'm hesitant to let computer failures stand in the way of normality. Major infrastructure may be interrupted by nature but it can be scary for it to be stopped by computer problems. Who knows how long the system will be down? Who knows how much damage to information went unnoticed? Who knows what errors still exist?
Increasing computerization causes increasing paranoia. Guard yourself prophylactically? Ask hard questions before entering relationships with big business? Insist on financial compensation against computer delays?
Computer systems need to be built with more safeguards (redundancy, logging, checkpoints, backups), isolation of failure, data accessibility during failure (example: Windows safe mode) even for end users, etc.
Re:Windows (Score:1, Interesting)
The system in question is most likely "AirFlite",
a Unix based system hosted by a joint
venture between Sabre and EDS.
Do you know the cost of redundency ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Redundancy is OK, as long as it is not bleeding you dry.
Air Canada at the same time too (Score:3, Interesting)
href=http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/
Probably just the CIA moving them all onto some big CIA super-computer.
Re:Great News! (Score:3, Interesting)
After I submitted the grandfather post, I saw something I'd missed first time around:
The operating system that drives the airline's flight plans went down. It might even be a Windows problem. A 'Flight Planning' application is a low volume application where you work out the optimum route for a plane based on the weather. That bit about the weather involves serious number crunching and the PC world has more of that kind of power to spare than the mainframe world. I helped write one of these apps 20-18 years ago and the central part has since been converted to run on PCs.
Sorry about that
This isn't what you think (Score:3, Interesting)
Even though this sounds dire, I have a feeling that this does nothing to compromise airline safety.
From the sounds of it, the flight planning system went down. This is a ground-system only, often a terminal next to the ticket checking counter. The purpose is to file flight plans, check weather airport conditions, etc. It is not an onboard system. This would not have likely decreased passenger safety.
The reason that the FAA got involved was because AA decided to ground the planes because the pilots most likely couldn't file flight plans electronically. If left to the filing flight plans the old way, it would have delayed things more and caused more headaches to just wait out the system outage.
However, when any business runs and depends on a particular piece of software to generate revenue and to provide a service, I would be more inclined to host such a system on something like a mainframe or at least a big Unix server.
Re:Not Windows, Unix (Score:3, Interesting)
They use the same system for flight operations and for reservations? I've seen Sabre in use at the travel agent's office, somehow I would have thought this problem involved a different system...
Probably Sabre Holdings, rest probably wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, this failure isn't in the Sabre reservations system, it's in some ancillary product, so who knows? Maybe they have no intention of switching it to Unix.
Third, he didn't say so, but the migration isn't just to Unix. It's also migration to MySQL! (Hahahahahahahaha. Then again, coming from TPF, coded in assembly language for 4Kword pages, and a hierarchical database, that might seem pretty advanced.) Sabre had to fund a MySQL port to 64 bits, and a new "stored procedures" feature.
Re:Not Windows, Unix (Score:3, Interesting)
What's going on here? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm... what's going on here?
Re:Wild speculation (Score:5, Interesting)
I just read all the stories that were linked to this article.
None of them blamed Microsoft. In fact the only blame pushed in their direction was your comment...
The articles did say that there was a problem with the operating system. Now we don't know who exactly said this, or what they said precisely, so it is quite possible that this isn't entirely accurate reporting.
I find it very difficult to believe that they would have any single points of failure in a system of that importance.
I agree it's unlikely, but it is possible that there is a single point of failure in their system. There are a great deal of shoddily engineered systems in use today.
Re:Operating System (singular) (Score:3, Interesting)
Same Thing Happened to NorthWest (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd think they'd have redundancy and backups, but they probably don't. That requires some planning beyond the immediate need of the company and, even if it's more profitable to invest in backups, long term planning simply isn't considered as much.
This happens to my University all the time. The power goes out in one building for a few hours and services across the entire University are disrupted completely. This building happens to house most of the license servers for important software, but no one would _ever_ think of putting a backup license server in another building _just in case_. No, that'd be thinking ahead.