# United Airlines glitch leaves passengers stranded



## amtrakwolverine (Nov 15, 2012)

> NEW YORK - The computer glitch that left thousands of United Airlines passengers around the globe stranded at airports and on planes has been resolved, Reuters reported.




http://news.msn.com/us/united-airlines-glitch-leaves-passengers-stranded


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## railiner (Dec 1, 2012)

amtrakwolverine said:


> > NEW YORK - The computer glitch that left thousands of United Airlines passengers around the globe stranded at airports and on planes has been resolved, Reuters reported.
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I'm no expert, so can only speculate....when United and Continental merged as "equals", that was the cause of their problems. If one or the other had simply purchased the other, then they would simply expand their existing methodoloy and policies, rather than try to make two conflicting systems, contracts, culture, etc. meld into a new one.


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## jis (Dec 1, 2012)

railiner said:


> amtrakwolverine said:
> 
> 
> > > NEW YORK - The computer glitch that left thousands of United Airlines passengers around the globe stranded at airports and on planes has been resolved, Reuters reported.
> ...


This failure did not involve anything that has been touched by the merger yet. So I don't think the speculation presented by you is relevant in this case, though one could discuss it in the context of certain earlier failures.

In general United selected one of the two systems that came with the merger and moved everything over to the selected system. This they have been carrying out in a stepwise fashion tackling one domain at a time. That is what they did with the reservation and passenger management system which they moved over to the ex-Continental SHARES system, and there were problems with it early on, but mostly that is all past now. Ironically, this particular failure involved a system that has not been touched by the merger, so would probably have happened even if there was no merger. The flight management systems have not been merged or transitioned to a single system yet, and will not be until much later. The failure was in the pre-merger United system and affected only those flights operated with pre-merger United planes and crews. There was no effect on the pre-merger Continental operated flights except for knock on effects to accommodate passengers affected by the failure on the pm-United side.

Incidentally, this sort of failure hits various airlines from time to time. Basically among other things, they are unable to get weight and balance computations done fast and have to do so by hand the old fashioned way, delaying everything.


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## railiner (Dec 1, 2012)

jis said:


> railiner said:
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> > amtrakwolverine said:
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Interesting. Thanks for that information...

I haven't been involved in any of that since I briefly sold UAL on the ancient Apollo system in the early '70's....


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## jis (Dec 1, 2012)

railiner said:


> Interesting. Thanks for that information...
> 
> I haven't been involved in any of that since I briefly sold UAL on the ancient Apollo system in the early '70's....


You're welcome. Furthermore this was not even United's fault. It was the server farm service provider who managed to cut a critical fiber bundle. This is the moral equivalent of the proverbial "backhoe incident" which everyone in the telecom world is familiar with, and could happen to anyone. So this was not even a fault of the pm-United system. It was a misfortune that it is housed in a server farm which lost network connectivity.

Amtrak has faced the exact same problem in the recent past when the Philadelphia CETC center lost network connectivity screwing up an entire day of operations on the NEC.


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## Ryan (Dec 3, 2012)

jis said:


> pm-United


This gives me an opportunity to ask what I'm sure is a dumb question - what does the "pm" stand for? I've also seen sUA and sCO while reading FlyerTalk and can't make heads or tails out of what they're talking about.


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## Trogdor (Dec 3, 2012)

PM refers to "pre-merger" United (or Continental).

sUA and sCO refer to "subsidiary - UA (or CO)" since the two companies are still technically separate subsidiaries of UCH (United-Continental Holdings).

I agree that the sudden invention and proliferation of shorthand codes can be frustrating when you don't exactly know what they mean.


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## Ryan (Dec 3, 2012)

Thanks - figured that it was something obvious, just couldn't come up with it.

And yeah, it's like they're speaking a different language over there!


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## jis (Dec 3, 2012)

For someone like me who has gone through half a dozen mergers, acquisitions and divestitures just within my career path, this is not a new term. The first time I saw it used extensively was back in the context of the HP - Compaq merger, hen the term pm-HWP and pm-CPQ was used quite often and freely. Of course in that case there was no significant s-HWP and s-CPQ, though both companies did exist as skeleton subsidiary of the new HPQ. But there was hardly anyone that worked for those companies, so theyw ere not mentioned much.


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