News of Comair's flight staffing computer glitch that shutdown airline on Christmas day and the day after
News
Oh, wow, this is tragic.
Travelers stranded away from home on Christmas day due to a Comair airline's computer glitch. That is too bad, especially in light that there have been other similar glitches at other airlines earlier this year. I wonder where Comair's software got itself written?
Maybe there is a common thread and this whole thing can be debugged before it happens again.
Update, December 30: I read a day or two ago that the whole problem was caused by a defective computer program that used a 16-bit signed integer counter to keep track of staffing changes. When the number of staff changes for flights reached some number in the tens of thousands, the program just lost it. Unfortunately in winter time a lot of people get sick and a lot of people's plans change at Christmas time.
Ironically, this is when the airline needed this program to work the most. Programmers and designers need to design their programs such that people who use them a lot do not wind up not being able to use them at all. Anyway, the airline was already in bankruptcy and this glitch apparently caused by a software bug, resulting in passengers and planes being grounded for a couple of days, did not help financial matters out at all. Also, it probably coat them in terms of goodwill (financial term to describe how likely a company is to get return business from existing customers) at all.
Oh, wow, this is tragic.
Travelers stranded away from home on Christmas day due to a Comair airline's computer glitch. That is too bad, especially in light that there have been other similar glitches at other airlines earlier this year. I wonder where Comair's software got itself written?
Maybe there is a common thread and this whole thing can be debugged before it happens again.
Update, December 30: I read a day or two ago that the whole problem was caused by a defective computer program that used a 16-bit signed integer counter to keep track of staffing changes. When the number of staff changes for flights reached some number in the tens of thousands, the program just lost it. Unfortunately in winter time a lot of people get sick and a lot of people's plans change at Christmas time.
Ironically, this is when the airline needed this program to work the most. Programmers and designers need to design their programs such that people who use them a lot do not wind up not being able to use them at all. Anyway, the airline was already in bankruptcy and this glitch apparently caused by a software bug, resulting in passengers and planes being grounded for a couple of days, did not help financial matters out at all. Also, it probably coat them in terms of goodwill (financial term to describe how likely a company is to get return business from existing customers) at all.
posted by John Collins | 4:56 PM
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