A massive computer outage at United Airlines early Thursday stranded passengers across the country.A spokesperson for United tells WGN-TV that the airline is up and running again.
United Airlines, just a week before the year's busiest travel period, experienced yet another major computer problem Thursday morning that delayed hundreds of flights across the country, mostly on the East Coast. Some airline industry observers called for "heads to roll" at the world's largest airline.
The latest glitch involved the dispatch system software that enables Chicago-based United to communicate with airplanes before departure, delivering information on the plane's weight and balance, number of passengers and baggage, said United spokesman Charlie Hobart.
Flights of United's regional jet service, United Express, were not affected.
The outage occurred from about 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. Thursday and resulted in 257 delays directly attributable to the outage and more through the day, along with about 10 cancellations. The airline said it had 636 delays Thursday, far more than its typical number of about 300. The delays affected a relatively small number of the airline's 5,500 daily flights — fewer than 5 percent, Hobart said.
The impact at O'Hare International Airport seemed to be minimal, United and airport officials said.
United has had rampant problems with an unrelated system, its passenger reservation system it switched to in March. In August, the airline had another unrelated network outage that occurred when a piece of communication equipment in a United data center failed and disabled communications with airports and the United website, United.com. That was due to a failure at a United vendor.
The computer problems, especially the reservation system problem that affected flights in midsummer, have had Jeff Smisek, CEO of United's parent company, United Continental Holdings, making public apologies since March. He conceded to Wall Street analysts that operational problems hurt the airline's third-quarter profits as many customers fled to competitors. But he said during an earnings call with analysts in late October that those problems were behind the airline and that he was confident United would perform well during the busy holiday travel season.
Aside from weather-related delays, such as superstorm Sandy and a snowstorm on the East Coast, that seemed true until Thursday's outage. Even on Thursday, United's on-time performance was about 80 percent, meeting its target, a spokesman said.
"It was a software issue that we found and fixed in that two-hour period," United spokesman Rahsaan Johnson said. "It will not happen again."
Hobart said he did not have details about what went wrong.
Joe Brancatelli, a business travel writer at JoeSentMe.com, said the failures point to a larger problem.
Some industry observers said United is out of excuses.
"It is flat-out unacceptable," said Henry Harteveldt, co-founder of Atmosphere Research Group. "This makes United a laughingstock among airlines."
He said airline computer systems are complex and Thursday's problem might be a one-time issue, but the repeated failures are not only embarrassing for United, they "undermine trust in the airline" and "demoralize employees."
"There are clearly failures in the airline's strategy and the airline's execution, and heads need to roll," he said. "United's (chief information officer) should resign or be dismissed."
Hobart said the airline has improved recently.
"Since this summer, we've significantly improved our operational performance, with nearly 85 percent of our flights on time so far this month and nearly 80 percent of flights arriving on time in October, despite operational challenges like Hurricane Sandy," he said. "We understand this outage was frustrating for our customers, and we are enabling them to rebook without penalty and receive a full refund if their flights were delayed by at least two hours."
"Mostly what it says is that (airlines) have got to stop looking at mergers as two route maps you can smash together," Brancatelli said. He contends that the United-Continental merger was not planned properly.
"There are too many things going wrong," he said. Blame rests with "the guys running the show," he said of United's top executives. "The fish stinks from the head."
gkarp@tribune.com
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