A great story from CIO.com on how a crash of a legacy system brought a US regional airline to a standstill for several days, and all that lead to that.
The replacement of the crew scheduling system was among those next on the list. But after nearly 15 years in use, the business had grown accustomed to the SBS system, and much of Comair's crew management business processes had grown directly out of it. Just look at a pilot's contract at Comair; the definition of a workday is lifted straight out of the old SBS crew management application and expressed in Julian minutes the way the system did. (There are 44,640 Julian minutes in a 31-day month.) "That's the reason why it's almost impossible to replace these systems," says John Parker, former airline CIO[...]As it turned out, the crew management application, unbeknownst to anyone at Comair, could process only a set number of changes—32,000 per month—before shutting down. And that's exactly what happened. On Christmas Eve, all the rescheduling necessitated by the bad weather forced the system to crash. As a result, Comair had to cancel all 1,100 of its flights on Christmas Day, stranding tens of thousands of passengers heading home for the holidays. It had to cancel nearly 90 percent of its flights on Dec. 26, stranding more.
There was no backup system. It took a full day for the vendor to fix the software. But Comair was not able to operate a full schedule until Dec. 29.
So, you'd think that after all this trouble they would replace the system? Think twice:
But whether Delta will invest more in Comair's IT remains to be seen. In its 2004 annual report, Delta said that it will post another substantial loss in 2005. A bankruptcy filing remains a possibility. And, says Childress, "when the airlines are in trouble, it's a lot harder to find cash for IT renewal and replacement." In fact, Delta has not ruled out the possibility of selling Comair or the other regional airline it owns to raise cash.