United Airlines computer snag delays takeoffs

United Airlines was forced to temporarily ground all flights on Wednesday morning after experiencing a computer system failure, the Federal Aviation Administration has confirmed.

The outage took place between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. PDT on Wednesday.

"It was their system, not ours. It was their decision whether they would go up or not. They are now up and running," an FAA representative said.

A total of 24 domestic flights were canceled, and 268 domestic and international flights were delayed by an average of one and half hours, according to United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski Janikowski.

"We do not know the cause of the outage, and it's something that we will investigate. The computer outage affected the systems that United uses to dispatch flights for departure," Janikowski said in an e-mailed statement.

Flights could continue to be delayed as the airline recovers from the outage. United has posted a notice on its Web site recommending that people check the status of their flight(s) before heading to the airport.

"We continue to work hard to resume operations by tomorrow morning and kindly ask for our customers' patience," Janikowski said.

[enginerd1]

Am I Taking Crazy Pills?

1) Am I taking crazy pills or is the decision to propagate transportation delays to EVERY subsequent United flight (and thus God knows how many thousands / millions of travelers) a grotesque ethical violation. Perhaps a wiser idea would have been to cancel only those flights effected at the down time, and put those passengers on other airlines. That way the number of people inconvenienced would be minimized if not negligible. Of course, then United would have to care more about their passengers and less about saving every last penny of their tax-subsidized profits.

2) How hard can it possibly be to create functional airline scheduling software? I would love to hear what other computer algorithms people think. Could it be any harder than a FedEx routing algorithms? Do packages wait 5th in line for 2hrs while an attendant clicks away on their keyboard for an interminable length of time, only to switch what truck each package goes out on? I'd love to hear some feedback.

[chabig83]

It's hard

1) Am I taking crazy pills...

You're taking crazy pills. If a flight is delayed, then every
subsequent has to be delayed because the number of available
airplanes if finite.

2) How hard can it possibly be to create functional airline
scheduling software?

It's hard. And people and cargo has to be taken to the place the
airline has been paid to take it. You can't just "create" a whole
new schedule on short notice.

[okvol]

The reason that they could not fly is simple

On a full size jet, freight is how they keep the cost reasonable for passengers. US Mail is one big freight customer, and there are others such as DHL.

The weight balance of a plane is critical. That last commercial crash in NC was probably due to imbalance, and commuter flights are usually hand calculated.

Full size jets are balanced by a subset of the reservation system that assigns seats, positions freight, and orders fuel. Without these complex calculations, the jets could be tail heavy and easily crash.