This year, Alaska Airlines joined a long list of airlines forced to ground planes due to information technology failures.
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Tony Scott had already boarded a flight from Seattle to Dallas back in July when he started having problems.
It was around 8 pm on Sunday when the crew asked passengers to disembark the plane. The next day Alaska Airlines was supposed to cancel hundreds of flightsmany of them left their center at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
“It was chaos,” Scott recalls. “The people handling the luggage were clearly overworked. Customer service staff were overwhelmed. Every aspect of it was, you know, just a disaster, and people were left without information, with incorrect information.”
Alaska joins a long list of airlines forced to… ground your planes due to IT failures in recent years.
Millions of Americans will fly during the holidays. Each of these flights depends on complex computer systems that manage the crew, assign seats, and more. Sometimes these systems fail, and when they do, they can shut down an entire airline.
Each incident is slightly different from the faulty software update that caused the outage thousands of Delta Air Lines flights last year, in holiday crisis it brought Southwest Airlines to its knees three years ago. But industry experts say some lessons need to be learned about why these systems fail and what airlines can learn from past failures.
“It's the foundation of this ecosystem that is extremely fragile,” says Ish Sundaram, JetBlue Airways' former chief information officer.
The industry is unusual because much of what airlines do lacks commercially available software tools, he said. Airlines must either build their own systems or assemble them from multiple suppliers.
“The problem is that when things fall apart, it happens quite quickly,” says Sundaram, who now runs venture capital fund Utpata Ventures. “All it takes is 100 flights to be canceled to completely shut down the entire network.”
Alaska Airlines Blamed IT Outage in July”unexpected failure“critical equipment in one of the data centers. (The company was also damaged”significant“a crash in October that forced the company to cancel more than 100 flights.)
After Alaska's first blackout, Tony Scott slept on the floor of the Seattle airport. But Scott isn't just a disgruntled traveler; He is also a technology industry veteran, having served as chief information officer for both Microsoft and the federal government under President Obama.
Scott, who is now the CEO of a cybersecurity company called Intrusion, has several theories about why airline computer systems are prone to major IT failures like the one he experienced first-hand.
“It's just a web of technologies that have been used to automate everything they do, and they were all developed at different times by different people,” Scott says. “If you sat down and made it from scratch, you would never have designed it the way it is.”
If an airline's network goes down, getting it back up and running won't be easy. Southwest Airlines learned that lesson the hard way three years ago when a severe winter storm hit much of the country. While other airlines managed to resume operations within a few days, Southwest didn't.
“We were hit hard in a couple of key cities that were very important to our crew network,” said Lauren Woods, Southwest's chief information officer. She was just appointed to this position and has not yet officially started work in December 2022.
Since then, Woods tells NPR, the airline has invested heavily in its technology, including its flight crew management system.
“We would see problems much earlier in the process, especially around our network of crews, so we've been able to withstand even more severe disruptions since then,” Woods says. “These capabilities and the investments we've made really help us become a much better airline in the future.”
Southwest is not immune to technical problems. But now the airline can now respond quickly and proactively, she adds.
“We can have a technology glitch, but you don't care if it takes five minutes to recover, and I have a lot of those, as opposed to the fact that I had one major technology glitch and it knocked me out for the day,” Woods says.
Thus, failures in the information technology sector will be repeated. It's just a matter of when. And the test for airlines is how quickly they can get their planes and their customers back in the air.
