American Airlines Adopts Public Cloud Computing

Did you know that the reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). Designed by IBM in the 1960’s it was designed to process a large numbers of transactions quickly. Although IBM is still updating the code, the last major rewrite was about ten years ago. With all the major technologies changes since then, it’s clear that IBM has already accomplished a herculean task by keeping an application viable for over 50 years!Just like Americas aging physical infrastructure, the airlines are suffering from years of minimal investment in their information technology. This critical failure has been highlighted by a number of newsworthy incidents including:·         Delta, April 4, 2017 – Following storms that affected its Atlanta hub, Delta’s crew-scheduling systems failed, causing days of operational issues for the airline. Buzzfeed reports that flight staff were left stranded and unable to log in to internal systems. There were reportedly hours-long wait times on the crew-scheduling phone system.·         United, April 3, 2017 – A problem with a system used by pilots for data reporting and takeoff planning forced United to ground all flights departing from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston for two hours. This is the third time that this system has been blamed for causing operational problems at United. Around 150 flights operated by United or its regionally flying partners out of IAH were delayed on the day, and about 30 were canceled, according to flightaware.com.·         ExpressJet, March 20, 2017 – A system-wide outage at ExpressJet delayed flights it operates as Delta, United, and American Airlines for hours. The FAA issued a ground-stop at the airline’s request, preventing its planes from taking off. On the day, it had 423 delays and 64 cancellations, about a third of its scheduled

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