- Many airlines and the FAA rely on old technology.
- When computer glitches happen, they can throw the whole air travel system into chaos.
- Experts say IT upgrades are needed to make the industry more resilient.
When Tallie Davis’ flight was delayed, she faced a difficult choice. She and her college bowling team were set to fly with Southwest Airlines around noon Wednesday, heading back to Louisville, Kentucky, from Las Vegas, where they had been for a tournament. But when their first flight was pushed back an hour and a half, leaving them just five minutes to make their connection in Chicago, they were forced to consider other options.
They thought about going and hoping they would “get a pilot that would wait a couple of minutes” for them, or trying to drive the rest of the way from Chicago. But after talking with the airline, the 20-year-old said, the group decided to push their flights back by a day at no charge.
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Davis, who also is a mental health technician at a psychiatric hospital, had to miss work, and she and her teammates had to pay for an additional night at a hotel. But the extended visit had some perks. “We actually had the day to go out (in Las Vegas) more, so it’s more of a team bonding experience for us rather than rushing to get home,” she said.
Davis was among the luckier travelers Wednesday.
A system outage at the Federal Aviation Administration resulted in more than 10,000 delayed flights and well over 1,000 cancellations, leading to a day of headaches for travelers and crews across the country. For part of the morning, the FAA put a pause on departures nationwide for the first time since 9/11.
The agency “determined that a data file was damaged by personnel who failed to follow procedures,” the FAA said Thursday. But experts told USA TODAY that old technology is frequently behind hiccups across the national aviation network.
Old tech in aviation
Between the FAA’s glitch on Wednesday and Southwest’s computer meltdown earlier this winter, experts say it’s clear the IT systems behind air travel are strained, especially as demand for flights rises.
“The system’s getting older. At some point, they’re easier to hack maybe – they have more failure points,” said Alex Cruz, former CEO of British Airways and a board member at Fetcherr, an AI firm focusing on airline pricing and revenue management.
Cruz added that airline IT infrastructure performed especially well during the coronavirus pandemic when few people were traveling, but now that demand is back up, the systems are straining under renewed pressure.
“That’s an unintended IT test that’s taking place across the whole industry,” he said. “It wouldn’t be crazy to see other cases in months to come as passenger volumes continue going up.”
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Are passengers entitled to compensation when aviation technology fails?
It’s hard to say for sure.
When an airline cancels a flight for any reason, the Department of Transportation requires the company to refund passengers who choose not to travel, even if they had purchased nonrefundable tickets.
With a flight delay, the regulations are less clear, and policies vary by airline.
When Southwest had its interruptions, it agreed to compensate passengers not only with refunds but also with bonus frequent flyer miles and reimbursements for incidental expenses.
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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has said he will do what he can to hold Southwest and other airlines accountable.
It’s less clear, however, whether the FAA will be similarly on the hook to make passengers whole, though some industry watchers, including Brett Snyder, who runs the Cranky Flier blog, are calling on the agency to put its money where its proverbial mouth is and pay up for its own system error.
“Who should be responsible when it’s the FAA that causes all those cancellations and delays?” he wrote in a post Thursday. “It should be the federal government.”
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Passengers shouldn’t hold their breaths, though. Buttigieg didn’t agree with the suggestion Wednesday that the FAA should reimburse travelers.
But for most travelers, it doesn’t matter much who pays. The frustration of delays or cancellations is enough to leave a bitter taste.
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Chris S.E. and his wife were in Boise, Idaho, for his father’s funeral and booked to depart to Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., on a United Airlines flight scheduled to leave at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday. They ended up sitting on the tarmac for three hours.
The couple missed their connecting flight to Dulles by 15 minutes and spent the next couple of hours trying to get rebooked for a flight that evening but got “zero help from United.” They ended up spending about $2,500 of their own money on new tickets.
“I expected United to be all-hands-on-duty,” S.E. said. “Clearly, a flight nightmare was coming, and they should have been ready when we got off the plane. Every one of the routes we tried to use to work with United failed miserably on their part – leaving us to fend for ourselves.”
S.E. said he hopes United will refund his “years of accumulated points” that he used for his original flights, which he and his wife never flew.
How can this get fixed?
According to Cruz from Fetcherr, airlines and the federal government need to commit to investing in tech upgrades or travel upheavals could become more common.
“This is the largest unspoken item and challenge that the airline industry has post-(pandemic) recovery and after continuing to address sustainability issues,” he said. “It cannot go unaddressed forever.”
In a call with investors on Friday, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Washington needs to step up to keep the FAA’s systems running smoothly.
“It’s very clear that there has to be a call to action amongst our political leaders, Congress and the White House to fund the FAA and provide the resources they need to do the job,” Bastian said. “We’ve long talked about the need to modernize our air traffic control systems.”
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Cruz said he expects airline boards – and Congress when the FAA is up for reauthorization later this year – will be taking a closer look at their IT spending to see whether they’re investing what they need to keep things up to snuff.
“What has happened over the years, if you have changed the skin around the heart, you changed some of the muscles around the heart – that’s good because the heart keeps pumping, but the original (technological) heart is still the same,” he said. “It would be in the interest of most airlines that work in the airspace to assess if their heart is in good condition.”
