Worldwide system failure ----Delta Air Lines

[RT51]

As of the evening of 8/8 it still having ripple effects. As I have mentioned before (probably too many times) I work for a regional airport in New England. Flights that were canceled and then re-booked for 8/9 have now been canceled again.The aircraft that was supposed to arrive tonight, and overnight for departure in the morning was cancelled. I received so many calls tonight asking to talk to a representative for Delta at the airport I work at, and I am unable to do that. According to the passengers I talked with, calling the 800 number to re-book would have a wait time of up to 3 hours to talk to someone. I felt bad, but there is nothing I could do to help them.

This summer has been horrible for cancellations and delays due to storms. The airlines actually have less cancellations/delays in the winter than in the summer as aircraft can still be loaded during a snow storm. Thunder storms are a different story as ramp agents are not allowed on the ramp if the storm has lightning in a 2 mile radius.

I actually work for the airport as an emergency dispatcher but also take outside calls for customer service. I think I need to retire soon, after 17 years of doing this!:tantrum:

 

[CARIIS]

As of the evening of 8/8 it still having ripple effects. As I have mentioned before (probably too many times) I work for a regional airport in New England. Flights that were canceled and then re-booked for 8/9 have now been canceled again.The aircraft that was supposed to arrive tonight, and overnight for departure in the morning was cancelled. I received so many calls tonight asking to talk to a representative for Delta at the airport I work at, and I am unable to do that. According to the passengers I talked with, calling the 800 number to re-book would have a wait time of up to 3 hours to talk to someone. I felt bad, but there is nothing I could do to help them.

This summer has been horrible for cancellations and delays due to storms. The airlines actually have less cancellations/delays in the winter than in the summer as aircraft can still be loaded during a snow storm. Thunder storms are a different story as ramp agents are not allowed on the ramp if the storm has lightning in a 2 mile radius.

I actually work for the airport as an emergency dispatcher but also take outside calls for customer service. I think I need to retire soon, after 17 years of doing this!:tantrum:

That was interesting to learn about summer vs winter thanx!!

Have some cute, hysterical, or biazirre tales to tell - we are all "eyes"!

 

[Betty P]

Hi Hat

switchgear, which helps control and switch power flows like a circuit breaker in a home, malfunctioned for reasons that were not immediately clear....

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-delta-air-outages-idUSKCN10J0VP

big computer systems that get airplanes, passengers and baggage to their destinations every day are having a bad summer.

Delta Air Lines experienced the latest debacle on Monday,

Southwest Airlines three weeks earlier, when a single notebook-size router failed at a data center in Dallas, .......2,300 canceled flights over four days. The failure itself lasted only an hour, but it took 13 hours to reboot the carrier’s computer systems.

Both episodes left thousands of passengers ..... a better question might be why it doesn’t happen more often.

“These systems are so complex, it’s surprising we haven’t had more major failures,” former chief architect at Sabre, the world’s largest computer reservations system.
Last year, malfunctions in United Airlines’ computer systems grounded hundreds of flights, .............. American Airlines experienced delays after a bug in its iPad software meant that pilots did not have accurate airport maps.

In Southwest’s case, a backup system was in place, .......... And Delta said on Monday that it was investigating why some of its own critical operations had not switched over to backup systems.
Continue reading the main story

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Southwest has said its malfunction on July 20 will cost the company tens of millions of dollars.

each minute its system processed 164,000 requests and approximately $250,000 worth of travel spending.

it said it would provide $200 in travel vouchers to customers who were delayed more than three hours or whose flight was canceled. (That is the law now-posted earlier.)


Delta Air Lines passengers waited in line at a ticket counter in Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey on Monday.
​

CreditSeth Wenig/Associated Press
Delta was scheduled to operate roughly 6,000 departures on Monday, and by the early evening, about 3,340 of those flights had departed. “




http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/business/delta-air-lines-delays-computer-failure.html?_r=0

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[FONT="] antiquated technology that has plagued many airlines.

[/FONT][/COLOR][COLOR=#333333][FONT="]raises questions about whether a recent wave of four U.S. airline mergers that created four large carriers controlling 85% of domestic capacity has built companies too large and too reliant on IT systems that date from the 1990s.

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[FONT="]there are about 3,600 social conversations involving Delta on [/FONT][/COLOR][COLOR=#333333][FONT="][/FONT]Twitter[FONT="],[/FONT][/COLOR][COLOR=#333333][FONT="] according to social media analytics firm Networked Insights. On Monday morning, there were 43,000.

[/FONT][FONT="]gates aren’t available for arriving flights. Further delays arise because planes and crews are out of position to follow the published schedule. It can take days for a carrier to recover and get all of its passengers to their destinations.

[/FONT]http://www.wsj.com/articles/delta-air-lines-says-computers-down-everywhere-1470647527​

[/FONT]

Sounds about right, CARIIS. The huge mergers creating vast, complex systems and pinching pennies on IT maintenance are likely behind these problems. A lot of these carriers are now outsourcing their IT maintenance to low bid contractors and they aren't fully inspecting and testing their work. Just incredibly stupid as it ends up costing them more money in the long run. The experts who build and maintain these elaborate computer systems deserve respect, good pay and job security. It's folly to divide up maintenance and management of IT into small, low-bid contracts to middlemen whose temporary workers (often located overseas) have no control or knowledge of what's being done on other parts of the system.

ETA: According to some IT people commenting online, the Southwest Airlines problem likely wasn't due to a problem in 1 small server. If that were the case, it wouldn't have taken 13 hours to reboot the system. Something else was wrong inside the system.

 

[CARIIS]

Until this outage, Delta had an impressive record, envied by other airlines. By June 9 of this year, Delta had already notched up 100 days where none of its own jets canceled flights — more than all of its major competitors' no-cancel days combined. And the cancellations during the other 61 days were mostly related to weather, not maintenance issues.
"Our people are hitting it out of the park, delivering on our promise to be a safe and reliable airline and making canceling cancellations a reality," Gil West, Delta's chief operating officer, said in a news release at the time trumpeting its record.

Sometimes, Delta took extreme measures to preserve that record such as letting delays roll on throughout the day instead of canceling

kinda cheating no?!

When United Airlines had a series of computer meltdowns in 2012, loyal business travelers abandoned the carrier.

Delta did some things right, like posting a video of Bastain apologizing to customers

It didn't help that Delta wasn't upfront, telling passengers what happened. Instead the airline initially blamed it on a power outage

http://www.azcentral.com/story/mone...d-tarnish-deltas-on-time-reputation/88503442/