From the "If it ain't broke" department - Reuters:
More airline outages seen as carriers grapple with aging technology
Airlines will likely suffer more disruptions like the one that grounded about 2,000 Delta flights this week because major carriers have not invested enough to overhaul reservations systems based on technology dating to the 1960s, airline industry and technology experts told Reuters.
Airlines have spent heavily to introduce new features such as automated check-in kiosks, real-time luggage tracking and slick mobile apps. But they have avoided the steep cost of rebuilding their reservations systems from the ground up, former airline executives said.
Whatever colorful clown suit the customer interacts with, they are still talking to an older mainframe.
The reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility, or TPF. It was designed in the 1960s to process large numbers of transactions quickly and is still updated by IBM, which did a major rewrite of the operating system about a decade ago.
Nothing wrong with mainframes but when the power goes out, the link between the 'user friendly' interface and the mainframe breaks and there is no longer any way to directly interface with the TPF.
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