a valid comparison is what type of experience have US' airline peers had with system reliability over the past several years...
I don't know but I don't think AA, CO, DL, or UA have had systems failures of this magnitude... but I'm not sure.
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also, while the failure was widespread, it did not appear to last a long period of time... anyone know how long everything was really down?
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other carriers have had multi-hour failures of separate/component systems....
The only one in recent memory was the Comair failure
In December 2004, a glitch developed in Comair’s flight crew scheduling software known as the SBS Legacy System. This forced the company to down all operations during the busy holiday season. 1,100 flights were cancelled and 30,000 passengers were grounded. During the disaster the company maintained that the winter storm that came to the Ohio Valley was main part of the problem and not their IT system. This storm caused Comair to cancel or delay more than 90 percent of their flights between December 22nd and 24th .The storm though was only part of their problem and not the single cause of it. On Christmas day the SBS legacy system, which was nearly two decades old, crashed. What no one at the company knew was that the reason the system crashed was that it had reached its limit. The system had an antiquated counter that logged schedule changes and by that day, it had logged more than its monthly limit of 32,768 changes. The weather caused so many schedule changes that the system had finally reached its limit and shut down. All the flights for December 25th were wiped out and most of those for the 26th. They had no backup system and their software vendor needed to take one full day to repair the system.
By the time the problem was resolved, the damage had already been done. Delta, which acquired Comair in 2000, lost almost all the profits earned by Comair in the previous quarter. They lost $20 million from the system failure.
If I recall one of the Senior Managers of Comair voluntarily tendered his resignation shortly thereafter. Luckily for Comair, US Airways had their legendary "Christmas Meltdown" at the same time which caught the medias attention more than the Comair event did.
When you consider that some of the systems in place have source code that dates back to the early 1960's. In fact Frank Lorenzo's bought Eastern Airlines in order to get what Eastern called "System One" which all of you know as SHARES. There are some US agents floating around the system who actually were trained on System One and can make SHARES purr like a kitten if you, as a customer get stuck. Two that I met are in BOS.
The system failure is yet another example of the high cost of cheap and the spreadsheet mentality of current management.
If you look at US IT from the Beery Era going forward you'll notice a few things.
SHARES was selected based solely on the estimated cost savings over SABRE. Does SHARES now perform as well as SABRE does? From where I sit the answer is NO! Has it improved since US's other IT debacle known as the Res Migration? Yeah it has, mainly because it had no place to go but up. Is it "World Class" or on par with other Star Partners, again I'd have to say NO.
When you run a bare bones IT operation, things like redundancy and disaster recovery take a back seat. US has likely saved many more millions more than this will cost. They say well.. Yeah it cost a few million but over the last 3 quarters we've saved $X by not doing the upgrades and even though this cost us $Y we still saved enough to meet our targets so we all get our bonus.
This is the way this current team operates and you see it at every turn. NO WHERE in their spreadsheet driven world is there room for the Customer and the fact that a great many people who were effected may never fly US Airways ever again. They don't care because they're focused on this quarter and not 2 years from now when Mr & Mrs Volvo and their 2.2 kids go to see Mickey. It doesn't mean they're evil, it's just who they are and like Oprah says,
"When people show you who they are BELIEVE THEM"
