WCA November 2016

From the Americas

As the morning of 8 th August wore on, and the effects of the Delta breakdown were being felt in airports nationwide and overseas, the system began slowly to reboot. While the costs to Delta have not yet been published, Southwest has said its malfunction of 20 th July will cost the company tens of millions of dollars. Backup processors need real-time data Airlines were among the early adopters of information technology (IT), building electronic reservation systems in the 1960s. But according to Bob Offutt, principal of Travel Technology Consulting and former chief architect at Sabre, the world’s largest computer reservations system, their systems have been rebuilt over the years. Given the high volume of transactions, he told the Times , the airlines’ data should be backed up continuously. Mr Offutt said that, while airlines have secondary systems in place – to provide emergency power, for example – their data is backed up not in real time but only a few times a day. Thus, even after a malfunctioning router or power source is fixed, it can take hours to bring the systems back online. Noting that the systems are very complicated, he made an important distinction: “It may be that they have a backup processor but not backup data.” Ms Kurtz pointed out that major airlines primarily use third-party processors like Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport to distribute their real-time flight data to travel booking sites such as Expedia and Travelocity. The airlines also, she wrote, contract with these services to run their internal reservations systems as well as their departure control systems for processing last-minute bookings, seat assignments and boarding. Delta, for instance, uses an in-house system to process passenger services and flight operations, but the system infrastructure is run by Travelport at its Atlanta data centre. Southwest uses Sabre for its domestic reservations and Amadeus for its international bookings, although it is in the process of migrating everything to the Amadeus system.  Pointing out that each passenger on each flight represents a separate log and multiple transactions (seat assignment, meal preference, child requirements, frequent-flier number, etc), Andrea Huguely, a spokeswoman for Sabre, supplied context for these responsibilities. Every minute, she told the Times , the Sabre system processes 164,000 requests and some $250,000 worth of travel spending.  Ms Kurtz wrote, “Airlines, of course, are only one of many industries with complex systems whose failure can be catastrophic.” Many companies, like banks and large financial traders, manage the risk by copying data to service areas powered by different data centres, so that they can continue working in the event of a malfunction. But to thousands of stranded travellers who on 8 th August could do nothing but cool their heels for hours in Delta boarding lounges, the airlines industry is the one needing most urgently to solve its communications issues.

As Kevin Bai, a Beijing-based analyst with the CRU Group, told Bloomberg , more tariffs in developed countries will not hurt Chinese steelmakers because their exports go mainly to Asian countries while they seek new business in Africa and the Middle East. As for Russian producers, according to Kirill Chuyko – a strategist at BCS Global Markets, Moscow’s largest brokerage – low production costs mean they are able to make money despite tariffs because they can reroute shipments to more distant markets.

Telecom

Heavily dependent on their communications systems, USA airlines have found themselves grounded by very minor glitches “The big computer systems that get airplanes, passengers and baggage to their destinations every day are having a bad summer.” Annalyn Kurtz, writing in the New York Times , easily proved her point. In an update to an on-going midsummer story, she reported that Delta Air Lines was working to reset its operations after a power failure at its Atlanta hub, the world’s busiest, led to cancelled flights and delays that left passengers stranded in airports. Around 1,000 of 6,000 Delta flights were scratched, the airline said. Recovery efforts, begun in the morning, continued into the evening, and cancellations were still being posted the following day. (“Delta Malfunction on Land Keeps a Fleet of Planes From the Sky,” 8 th August) As described in the Times , the “latest debacle” commenced when the failure of a piece of electrical equipment shut down Delta’s computer systems worldwide, setting off a cascade of paralysing events. A similar scenario had played out at Southwest Airlines three weeks earlier, when a notebook-size router failed at a data centre in Dallas, causing some 2,300 cancelled flights over four days. Last year, malfunctions in United Airlines computer systems grounded hundreds of flights; and American Airlines experienced delays after a bug in its iPad software meant that pilots did not have accurate airport maps. In every case the precipitating malfunction seems slight in comparison with the consequences. The Delta culprit was a switchgear, similar to a circuit-breaker installed as a safety measure in a private home. The Southwest electrical breakdown was remedied in only an hour, noted Ms Kurtz, but it took 13 hours to reboot the computer systems. Why, she wondered, were backup systems not equal to the challenge? “In the case of Delta, whatever occurred was clearly a catastrophic failure, and it is alarming that the backup system didn’t kick in,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, told Ms Kurtz. Delta said that some of its critical operations had failed to switch over to backup systems. Southwest said that its in-place backup system did not trigger, as intended, when the router failed.

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Wire & Cable ASIA – November/December 2016