Hey General, CAT II vs SBS

[strega7]

I was wondering if your gonna hammer on the Comair people like you did the SkyWest people over this computer problem. Since we (SkyWest) couldn't come through for your cousin on that foggy day in SLC I was wondering if any of your other relatives were affected by Comairs SBS failure.

 

[IAPS_degraded]

Bump, General, Bump

 

[JetPilot_Mike]

Bump, General, Bump

Is General your big brother or something? You're following him around like his little lap dog.

 

[IAPS_degraded]

.....

 

[Hovernut]

I'm sure the General has better things to do on Christmas than post of this board like the rest of us poor bastards! Now where did I leave that darned egg nogg?

If this rain parts company, I may declare tomorrow SBS day at Disney/MGM and burn another day off my season pass!

 

[Stifler's Mom]

I was wondering if your gonna hammer on the Comair people like you did the SkyWest people over this computer problem. Since we (SkyWest) couldn't come through for your cousin on that foggy day in SLC I was wondering if any of your other relatives were affected by Comairs SBS failure.

Comair should get hammered over this. A whole $hit load of people have had their Christmas screwed up because of this.

If it was ASA, I would hammer on them too. I heard on our ops freq in ATL the other day that a lady missed a flight to ZUR because the rampers couldn't park them in a timely manner. Evidently she was on her way to get married.

I have to shake my head at airline management. What a freakin' case study nightmare for business school students.

 

[sweptback]

But the problem is that it's cheaper to do it the wrong way (most likely much less expensive to do so) and hope you don't get stung that often. Then when you do get stung, hopefully it isn't that bad. If it isn't, lather rinse and repeat as necessary. If you do get stung bad, sadly you'll probably still come out ahead cost-wise.

I'm not ripping on Comair, they run a quality operation. It's more of a general rant.

There's no brand loyalty (or if there is, it's very little) in the airline industry anymore. Actually, there's very little loyalty to brands overall, but that's another story for another time. People affected by the snafu will be pissed for about a month, then when it comes time to buy their next ticket they won't remember or care. This is what fuels the desire to just do it "good enough" to save a buck or two... it doesn't really hurt the company to do so. If it did, you better believe that it would have been done right.

There will be a few that will never fly Comair again (or Delta because they don't know the difference). But really, the cost to the company in lost business will be minimal. Rarely do you hear of a company going under because they do a terrible job of dealing with customers.

 

[T-Gates]

Anyone who rags on Comair for this is an idiot. I can garantee that if any other airline's Crew Tracking software went T.U. they'd be grounded too. Except mabye the small 135 carriers that make you do the "Color-by-Numbers" duty time sheets.

 

[Ben Dover]

If anyone didn't get enough turkey or ham to eat today, I hear that crow is being served at the General's house...

 

[Stifler's Mom]

Anyone who rags on Comair for this is an idiot. I can garantee that if any other airline's Crew Tracking software went T.U. they'd be grounded too.

Sorry T-Gates, but I disagree. I'm sure that most airlines would be paralyzed because of this, but it should not happen to begin with, and if it does, there should be a backup plan. Even if it's pen and paper. Better late than never.

If you were one of the many Holiday Travelers that didn't make it to Christmas with family and friends, you'd be singing a different tune.


(CNN) -- Tens of thousands of travelers spent Christmas in an airport, as Comair canceled all of its flights.

Comair, which flies an average of 30,000 people per day, called off all 1,160 daily flights for both Saturday and Sunday. It will resume a limited schedule Monday, Comair spokesman Don Bornhorst said.

The computer system Comair uses to book pilots for flights broke down, he said.

Comair could not pinpoint a reason for the computer crash and could not say why there was no backup system.

There was "a lot of stress because of multiple changes going through the system," Bornhorst said.

That only exacerbated problems caused by severe weather this week for Comair, a Delta subsidiary that flies to 118 cities.

Many of the stranded passengers were at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Comair's hub.

Some passengers have had to sleep at the airport, Bornhorst said.

Other travelers have been booked on Delta flights, bused to airports in other cities or given vouchers for nearby hotels, he said.

To make matters worse, many bags had been misplaced, he said.

One woman said she and her family had decided to drive from Cincinnati to Rochester, New York, for her daughter's baptism.

The family's first flight had been canceled, and a second booking was lost.

"We got here this morning and they didn't have our reservation. There's nobody to talk to," the woman said.

Trying to get on another flight would mean waiting in a five-hour line, she said.

 

[doh]

My wife's a dba and she said that there is no disaster recovery plan in place. If there was this could not happen. I know I sound like Cartman here but That's what my mom...er... wife says.

 

[T-Gates]

Sorry T-Gates, but I disagree. I'm sure that most airlines would be paralyzed because of this, but it should not happen to begin with, and if it does, there should be a backup plan. Even if it's pen and paper. Better late than never.

It's all good, my point was just that how many other airlines really have their Crew Tracking backed up in paper form? Especially in a fleet as large as CMR? Everywhere I have worked has a backup for when the flight planning computers go down (manual releases). But I have never heard of what would happen if the scheduling software sh!t the bed. Mabye I'm worng, who knows. I'm sure everyone is quickly backing up thier systems just incase now.

Merry Christmas!

 

[filejw]

Well I know at NWA we would still be flying .More than once I'v been released over the phone with the computer down and as for crew tracking they would do it by hand.Crew times ,that's why you need a small log book for day to day stuff.

 

[dispatchguy]

The problem is is with the massive irregular operations the past few days, and crews flying overblock, doing all the math manually for an op as large as comair; well, it would be a ready-made incident for the CVG FSDO to see how violations they could write for going over duty times by a minute, etc.

Yeah, its not pretty, but they had to do it.

I was a crew scheduler at UAL back in 1999/2000, and when their crew scheduling system took a dump (same system as dispatch - Unimatic), we just stopped flying until it came back up.

UAL has a business resumption center at the Chicago Reservations Office just north of ORD on, I cant recall which road. One day I was driving into ORD to go to work, and the traffic guy on the radio said that the traffic around UAL WHQ due to a fire at that location, at the corner of Algonquin and Linneman, and I thought to myself driving in, "Isnt that WHQ's location?". This backup center has a backup Unimatic mainframe mirroring the main system every 5 seconds.

UAL was going to have the entire afternoon shift (sked, dispatch, ops control) report to Chicago Res to test its systems that day - instead, the morning shift did; there was a fire in the network cabling underneath the SOC floor due to renovation work being completed; all the network cabling had to be replaced, and the usual SOC was out of action for 2-3 months.

I remember reading in the Chicago tribune that UAL had to cancel only 4-5 flights due to the fire, and the transition of everyone to the backup ops control center.

 

[Hovernut]

My wife's a dba and she said that there is no disaster recovery plan in place. If there was this could not happen. I know I sound like Cartman here but That's what my mom...er... wife says.

She's exactly right! Any reputable company that's this dependent on IT should have a reliable DRP in place!! The only thing is SBS is so old, there may not be hardware readily available to run a mirror.