Why do airline computer systems fail? What the industry can learn from meltdowns

Why do airline computer systems fail? What the industry can learn from meltdowns This year Alaska Airlines joined the long list of airlines forced to ground their planes because of IT outages. Stephen Brashear/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Tony Scott had already boarded his flight from Seattle to Dallas back in July when his problems started. It was about 8 p.m. on a Sunday night when the flight crew asked the passengers to get off the plane. By the next day, Alaska Airlines would cancel hundreds of flights , many of them out of its hub at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. "It was chaos," Scott remembers. "The baggage people were clearly overwhelmed. The customer service people were overwhelmed. Every aspect of it was, you know, just a disaster and left people with no information, the wrong information." Alaska joined the long list of airlines forced to ground their planes because of IT outages in recent years. Millions of Americans will fly during the holidays . Every one of those flights depends on complex computer systems to manage the crew, assign the seats, and more. Occasionally, those systems fail - and when they do, they can ground an entire airline. Every incident is a bit different, from the faulty software update that grounded thousands of Delta Air Lines flights last year, to the that brought Southwest Airlines to its knees three years ago. But industry experts say there are some conclusions to be drawn about why these systems fail, and what airlines can learn from past disruptions. holiday meltdown "It's the backbone of this ecosystem that is extremely fragile," says Eash Sundaram, the former chief information officer of JetBlue Airways. The industry is unusual, he says, because there is a lack of commercially available software tools for much of what airlines do. Airlines either have to build their own systems, or cobble them together from multiple vendors. "The challenge is when one falls apart, it's cascading pretty quick," says Sundaram, who now runs the venture capital fund Utpata Ventures. "All it takes is 100 flights to be cancelled (to) completely shut down the entire network." Alaska Airlines blamed the IT outage in July on the " unexpected failure " of a critical piece of hardware at one of its data centers. (The company suffered another " " outage in October that forced it to cancel more than 100 flights.) significant After the first Alaska outage, Tony Scott wound up sleeping on the floor of the Seattle airport. But Scott is not simply a disgruntled traveler; he's also a veteran of the tech industry, having served as chief information officer both at Microsoft and in the federal government under President Obama. Scott, who is now the CEO of a cybersecurity company called Intrusion, has some theories about why airline computer systems are prone to major IT meltdowns like the one he experienced firsthand. "It's just a spider's web of technology that's been used to automate everything that they do, all architected...

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