# American Airlines outage



## jis (Apr 16, 2013)

American Airlines IT systems failed early in the morning grounding most of American Airlines for most of the morning and early afternoon today.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57579885/american-airlines-grounds-flights-after-computer-outage/

In addition, initially American Airlines incorrectly blamed SABRE whose reservation system AA uses. There was nothing wrong with SABRE and it was working fine all day. Later AA apologized for that faux pas.

In this age of e-Tickets, you are really up the creek without a paddle when you lose access to all the e-Ticket info.


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## leemell (Apr 16, 2013)

jis said:


> American Airlines IT systems failed early in the morning grounding most of American Airlines for most of the morning and early afternoon today.
> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57579885/american-airlines-grounds-flights-after-computer-outage/
> 
> In addition, initially American Airlines incorrectly blamed SABRE whose reservation system AA uses. There was nothing wrong with SABRE and it was working fine all day. Later AA apologized for that faux pas.
> ...


SABRE was originally developed by AA and IBM in the 60's and later sold an independently operated company Sabre Holdings, and it is was in COBOL! If I had to guess that in the many multiple millions of lines of code in this behemoth, there still is come COBOL.


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## Devil's Advocate (Apr 16, 2013)

COBOL is still used more than most people probably realize. Same thing with FORTRAN. Some of the world's most critical PLC systems are as open as a slice of Swiss cheese to anyone with the right manual. The more you know about how the real world of technology actually works the more amazing it is that it doesn't crater more often.


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## Nathanael (Apr 16, 2013)

The biggest problems with most of these early FORTRAN and COBOL programs are:

(1) Lack of data-code separation;

(2) Lack of proper subroutine structure.

This makes them really and truly hard to replace with modern programs. Modern programming languages frequently enforce #2 and nearly always enforce #1.


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## railiner (Apr 17, 2013)

I am not an IT person, but if I remember history correctly, wasn't it AA's SABRE people that developed the 'SPIKE', later 'ARROW', passenger reservation system for Amtrak in the 1970's?


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## saxman (Apr 17, 2013)

I read this as I was trying to get to DFW on United and watching all the seats on United disappear for AA folks coming over. Made for a fun commute home! Got to DFW via Dallas Love and taking 2 DART buses and a train to find passengers everywhere! Looks like many of them were waiting for chartered vans to take them to hotels that normally don't provide van service. Glad I was able to escape to my house!


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## Michigan Mom (Apr 23, 2013)

SABRE is a huge system, so there is no such thing as a small problem when it goes offline.


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