CHICAGO—A five-hour computer outage that virtually shut down United Airlines is a stark reminder of how dependent airlines have become on technology. Passengers saw their flight information vanish from airport screens on Friday night and early Saturday, and thousands were stranded as United canceled 36 flights and delayed 100 worldwide.
The airline still had no explanation on Saturday afternoon for the outage. But things could have been much worse.
A blizzard in the Northeast wiped out more than 10,000 flights over three days in December, a mid-January storm led airlines to cancel nearly 9,000 flights.
Friday’s shutdown occurred late enough in the day that many of the canceled flights were the last planes out for the day, said Henry Harteveldt, an airline analyst with Forrester Research. On a Monday morning, the results could have been catastrophic.
“It happened as a lot of the airline was going to sleep for the night,” Harteveldt said.
That doesn’t mean affected travelers were happy. “I’m just amazed at how catastrophic the failure was,” said Jason Huggins, 35, who was trying to fly home to Chicago after a week working at his software company’s San Francisco headquarters. “All the computer screens were blank, just showing the United logo.”
Huggins paid $1,200 to book one of the last three seats left on an American Airlines flight home.
Social workers Penny Nordstrom, 57, and Emily Schaefer, 42, who were trying to get home from Cancun, Mexico, to Spirit Lake, Iowa, said their delays started with a computer problem at midday Friday in Mexico.
“We’re way past 24 hours now,” Nordstrom said about noon on Saturday before she boarded a rebooked flight from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to Detroit for a connection to Sioux Falls. She expected to get home about midnight but hoped her travel insurance would offer some compensation.
United spokesman Charles Hobart said late Saturday that the airline didn’t expect to cancel any more flights this weekend due to the computer problems, though delays might continue.
Business travelers are usually hurt less by such disruptions than people flying for vacation or personal reasons because airlines first help passengers with elite status in frequent flier programs and those who bought more expensive, unrestricted tickets.
Jon Ryan, who had planned to fly nonstop from San Francisco to London on business Friday evening, was rebooked on partner airline Air Canada after two hours on the phone. His new itinerary: San Francisco to Toronto to Halifax to London.
“The poor, poor ticket agents were just bewildered and sitting behind the counter. Everybody was just staring and didn’t know what to do,” Ryan said. “The line grew and grew and then people went from sitting down to lying down.”
On a typical day, United, a subsidiary of United Continental Holdings Inc., cancels 15 to 30 flights for reasons ranging from fog to maintenance problems or staffing shortages. Those are understandable. Passengers and others said a computer glitch should not have grounded the airline.
(AP)
In Photo: United Airlines planes line the tarmac at San Francisco International Airport shortly after midnight on Saturday in San Francisco. (AP)
