It’s the beginning of a new year. Your systems have been in place for a long time and seem to run with, virtually, no problems.
Well, that’s what they thought at Comair. Over the holidays, Comair, a subsidiary of Delta Airlines, had been using a piece of software which tracks crew schedules called Track from SBS International. The version being used over the holidays happened to be about ten years old.
With the storms which occurred over the holidays, de-icing problems forced the cancellation of many flights which then required the crew schedules to be updated. Track had an (assuming unknown to Comair) internal limit of just over 32,000 schedule changes per day. Once the weather and de-icing problems forced the system to go beyond the 32,000+ limit, the entire system crashed and Comair had to cancel ALL of their flights since they couldn’t verify which crews were legally eligible to fly due to FAA regulations.
You have to wonder about the discussions that had to happen earlier about upgrading the Track software. How many times do you think they said, “We can get at least one more year out of that version, it’s been working just fine.”? Now, they know the answer: at least, one too many. |
