I'm not sure this is something that really could have realistically been avoided. Seven days worth of glycol is definitely adequate from a planning standpoint for two days worth of snow, especially with a half-dozen trucks on the way. SBS, while old, gave no indications of a meltdown at 32,768 commands. The paper backup system did go into effect, per FAA approvals, of course there is no way you can take a computer-trained scheduling department that the computer couldn't even run and operate anything significant with paper.
What is impressive to me is that, even with about 25-30 aircraft frozen to the ground in CVG, the rest stuck in outstations, no scheduling system, and crews spread out all over the country where schedulers don't know where they are, Comair is operating at around 15% completion. That's around 175 flights today, and they want to start a full schedule tomorrow. We rag on the schedulers and management, but if you look closely at what events happened, and the total lack of control Comair had over those events (such as weather and computer malfunctions), I'd say they did an outstanding job. Of course the media will point to a complete collapse of management, but I'd argue it was the outstanding policies and personnel in place that accomplished what it did. When other airlines lose their scheduling systems, its usually during normal operations when crew's know their assignments and everything is in automatic anyways. A paper system is not that difficult to implement with only 5-10% irregular operations. But Comair was operating at 95-100% irregular operations, and nobody has had a scheduling system fail in those circumstances. Not to mention your only pilot base could not accept any more aircraft, nor could it dispatch anymore due to the glycol shortage. Nobody could come to work, and nobody could go home, unless they lived somewhere else. A seperate crew base would have aleviated some of this, but where would it be? Delta's changing our schedule so much its dizzying. I'm sure those schedule changes didn't help the SBS situation either.
We can argue that SBS is way outdated and should have been replaced years ago, but from a decision making standpoint (and assumming they had no knowledge of the "32K bug") staying with SBS until they could find a replacement that met all of their requirements was the safe bet. The system was working, and while it needed to be updated, it did work, and until yesterday was a reliable system to Comair. The thought that SBS would explode like that would have been inconceivable only 48 hours ago.
Other airlines are doing the right thing in realizing it very well could have happened to them, and to check their scheduling systems for the same or similar bug.
As for Comair's ability to operate, I think if you'll look closely enough into the events, you'll find that they handled it as well as any other airline could have.
