Breaking news. At work and no time to read into it.
American Airlines at a ground stop
- Thread starter skyactiv
- Start date
4wd
$50 site donor 2026
Ground stop lifted, people are starting to board. It appears they fixed it.
I suspect it’s a major systems failure. American has still failed to integrate and update systems architecture after their mergers. Their operational statistics reflect those failures. This, I suspect, is one more manifestation of that sent of failures.
They're the only carrier of the big four to not suffer a major meltdown post covid.
Crowd strike took United down for 12 hours.
It took Delta down for a week.
SWA was unaffected by crowd strike because they’re running 20 year old software and machines, as evidenced by their weeks-long meltdown over the Holidays two years ago. They tried to make their resistance to Crowdstrike a bragging point, but it’s like saying “We are on Windows 95, so, we are way ahead of the competition”.
One only has to look at DOT statistics to realize American is a distant 3rd for operational performance, cancellations, on time, etc. and a big part of that is disjointed, legacy scheduling and support systems from 3 different airlines (America West, USAir, and American) that are still running. Doug Parker never finished the USAir/AW merger, so, for the board to put him in charge of AA was a huge mistake, one for which they have paying ever since.
It took Delta down for a week.
SWA was unaffected by crowd strike because they’re running 20 year old software and machines, as evidenced by their weeks-long meltdown over the Holidays two years ago. They tried to make their resistance to Crowdstrike a bragging point, but it’s like saying “We are on Windows 95, so, we are way ahead of the competition”.
One only has to look at DOT statistics to realize American is a distant 3rd for operational performance, cancellations, on time, etc. and a big part of that is disjointed, legacy scheduling and support systems from 3 different airlines (America West, USAir, and American) that are still running. Doug Parker never finished the USAir/AW merger, so, for the board to put him in charge of AA was a huge mistake, one for which they have paying ever since.
I was thinking of this event regarding United, but the CrowdStrike was another one.
https://www.miamiherald.com/detour/article277029263.html
As for ontime performance:
https://thehill.com/homenews/nexsta...-on-time-us-airlines-airports-of-2023-report/
If Windows 95 works in a particular application, why not?
That’s last year’s data.
United has invested hundreds of millions in systems and training to ensure we can manage through another simultaneous major weather event at multiple hubs. Our hubs are more affected by weather than other airlines. Last summer, 8 out of 10 days saw one of our hubs affected by weather or ATC problems. All external to us, but all impactful.
We know that.
Our CEO has adopted a “no excuses, sir” approach. He was USAF and that’s how the Academy trained him. We simply have to have better tools, better processes and better people than the competition to overcome the challenges of our hubs. We have made those investments.
This year is different as a result. United is 0.1% that is, one tenth of one percent, behind Delta.
I don’t include Alaska because they’re so small, but they do run a good airline. I would fly on them with confidence.
I’ve steered my daughter, who lives in SLC, to Delta. It’s the logical choice for her She is on Delta today to go home for Christmas.
She is the one who told me about American’s meltdown this AM. She had many bad experiences on American when she was interviewing a few years ago.
Because it doesn’t actually work. SWA’s week+ meltdown was a systems failure at its root. They had ignored the upgrades for decades, focused on keeping costs down.
That decision had consequences. They can’t get AI tools, better software, good information propagation across work groups. They were trying to come out of their crisis doing manual scheduling. They have since announced that they are spending hundreds of millions on updated IT architecture. They have to in order to survive with an airline of their size.
Sometimes, it is the cheapest man who spends the most. That was certainly true for them.
Gee back in the 70's when I worked for Flying Tiger Airlines, they used to do weight and balance using the old math!
Go out and get a quote for all the programmers that will take your Win95 software and rewrite it from Win95 APIs to run on fully hardened Win2022 server. What is that, a 30 year jump? On Wintel, where programmers typically have a 2 year attention span.
For all get out. Have airlines not learned to use multiple servers to shift the load or provide a backup (I'm assuming not)? I've been taking the Amazon AWS course and while it's not a model that works for everyone and everything the concept of having an option or alternative is. Plus I'm not familiar but if alot of the desktops would dump Microsoft and use something like Redhat Enterprise they'd be much better off. I know that there is alot of proprietary software and in many cases it isn't intuitive, and the people that ordered/installed it are looooong gone.
Some have.
Some even have an industry-recognized and award-winning CIO.
And some are penny pinching and running outdated systems.
I dealt with that at Frontier Airlines. Mediocre confusing software with no manual or guide and no safeguards. I've seen hotel software with better implementation. We had a company come in that wanted to sell us software. It would have required basic programming skills. I dabbled with learning basic programming in basic many years ago. I doubt there were even a dozen people in the entire building that had any programming experience or knowledge.
Application software is a necessary evil. The amount companies spend for the (poor) results is practically criminal.
I hate computers.
I hate computers.
I flew into Dallas/Fort Worth airport on American from Mazatlan, Mexico the evening of December 23rd. We then had a 4-hour layover to catch a connecting flight to Kansas City. During those four hours, our departing gate got changed 4 TIMES. Changing gates is no small matter at DFW because you have to use their Skytram and that gets interesting when 200 people want to use it at one time to get from one gate to the next. Between customs, the gate changes and the pre-Christmas travel, it was a little stressful. We noticed that the multiple gate changes affected many other flights as well.
To American's credit, our plane did leave on time to Kansas City and we arrived there at about 10:30 that night, about 15 minutes ahead of schedule.
4wd
$50 site donor 2026
In normal times - I like the DFW tram …
