Outdated Software, Nationwide Chaos: United Grounds Flights After Meltdown

I don't sympathize.

A well maintained 30-year-old car can drive cross country. There's a big difference between car thats old with a ton of known defects that the driver works around and a car thats old that had it's defects fixed when they came up.

I'll second this. If the hardware it runs on isn't literally dying, and it doesn't have glaring security vulnerabilities (ex. especially air gapped systems), and it's still doing its job well, it's fine to let it do its thing.

That being said, the reality is that requirements change. Load changes. The world around the software changes. Systems need to be resilient, yet flexible enough to be maintained but not replaced over decades.

It's not a given that you can't run an airline without legacy software. There are other airline companies that have modernized. Or newer ones that don't have to. And also companies selling software.

The issue here is United penny pinching for decades and now they are stuck with their in house created mess. The right move for them could be to buy one of the smaller upstarts with less issues and then just roll out whatever the small company is using and retire the creaking old mess that just failed them.

Any project to slowly modernize or update that is doomed to fail.

You see the same in the fintech world where small relatively new banks are running circles around their older competitors.

In the energy world, a British company called Octopus is actually licensing their platform (Kraken) to lots of energy companies around the world. One of the interesting things about companies that move to that platform is that they become a much more attractive target for M&A as well; because the job of migrating all the old customers is easier if both companies that are merging use the same, modern platform. That's the hard risky part of any merger. Apparently, in some cases the decision to move to Kraken was motivated as a preparation for this.

I'm mentioning this because that's something that could work in the airline industry. Or United can just zombie on for a few more years and then end up getting absorbed into some other, more successful company.

This stuff must be costing them at all levels in the company. I can't imagine it's very efficient. And the airline industry is pretty cut-throat at this point.

Some of United's own aircraft are over 30 years old [1]. If you can rely on a well-maintained 30+ year-old aircraft to fly you halfway accross the world I think you can rely on a similar-aged car to drive across the country.

[1]: https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/boeing-767-300-n641ua...

> You wouldn’t trust a 30-year-old car to drive cross-country.

The main difference between software and physical objects like cars is that they degrade with the passage of time (due to wear, corrosion, etc...). If we would magically be able to get a brand new 30-year-old car, it would make absolute sense to use one for a trip where reliability is paramount, as the failure modes of such a car are better understood compared to a brand new design, and can be mitigated.

Also I would totally trust a 1995 Toyota to drive cross-country.

I wouldn't trust any car to fly a plane, tbh.

I bet the problem is not the 30+ year old software, but the less than 30 year old crap they've dumped on top of it.

Also, how old are the planes?

I can’t see the WSJ article. None of the mainstream articles I could find discuss Unimatic in any detail, including the Reuters and NYT articles.

I figure that there has to be a forum out there where the nature of the software glitch is the focus, but I couldn’t find anything. If this story is AI generated, then I would very much like to read the sources it’s lifted from.

I did find a 2007 article discussing another Unimatic glitch that caused a stoppage which mentioned that the software dates from 1988:

https://www.aviationpros.com/home/news/10387920/computer-fai...

> The computer system, known as Unimatic, is essential to the airline's operation, providing flight plans for pilots, updates on maintenance information and crew schedules, among other flight information. United jets worldwide cannot take off unless it is operating. The original Unimatic system dates back to at least 1988, but it is updated "all the time," United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said.

Probably HN needs an automated verification for quality/legitimacy before accepting a submission.

Wow. I couldn’t tell. How did you find out that it may be AI generated.

A frustrating thing about paywalls on news sites is that they discourage linking to, because what's the point of linking to something if you don't know if the people you share the link with will be able to read it?

Which sadly leaves a gap in the market for AI slop. A few times recently I've tried to find a good news article to link to and had to chose between paywall sites, obvious AI slop or second-tier publications plastered with ads. I usually pick the third category.

"United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby earned $33.9 million in 2024, compared to $18.6 million in 2023, and $9.8 million in 2022"

https://onemileatatime.com/insights/highest-paid-airline-ceo...

He must know something, right? And it seems he knows more and more as the years go by.

I don't know, everywhere I look I see IT staff who don't care that much and can't problem solve. One possibility is that the IT leadership is herding cats very effectively and that things could be much much worse.

Beatings will continue until morale improves.

Usually, for the old/new distinction the architecture and used algorithm are relevant. Old software is often designed for less workload and lower complexity, and can easier get stuck in certain situations for which it wasn't designed.

For example, because of a holiday, the system would be confronted with more customers than it can handle, and any little change (like a failing plane or changing flight-staff) could lead to a crash of the system. IIRC this was a problem they had some years ago.

> The system manages flight information like crew scheduling, weight-and-balance calculations, and aircraft movement logs

You wouldn't want to fly an airplane whose weight and balance has been miscalculated (or maybe properly calculated but can't vet if it has)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_de_Aviación_Flight_0972

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Midwest_Flight_5481

There are large checklists that need to be completed prior to take-off, not sure how much of this is automated now but if that is no longer possible you're just not going to take off.

As long as the planes don't leave, the airline will know exactly where staff and equipment are: right where they were when the system broke. Once things get moving it becomes really complicated to figure out where everything is again.

During previous similar outages it has taken days to track down staff and equipment once the systems are up again. During this time delays and cancellations continue. It's possible the system is much faster to bootstrap given correct locations of things from the start.

I'm guessing the system handled sensitive/critical flight information:

>The system manages flight information like crew scheduling, weight-and-balance calculations, and aircraft movement logs.

Sounds like they got Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker to write this article

> incentivized by their shareholders

Those shareholders are their actual customers. Air traffic is just an annoying necessity.

I think i once heard this referred to as *delicapitalism* (or maybe it was deli-capitalism)...which, if recall correctly, means capitalist incentives, behaviors/actions that over time result in a more delicate world/ecosystem, etc. Something like that i think.

Delta was the one that was pointing the finger at MS.

I think that SABRE has been rewritten at least twice, though the last time could have been over 30 years ago.

I interviewed to work on the C version about 35 years ago.