back to article American Airlines: TITSUP computers ground US flights

American Airlines is blaming a computer breakdown for grounding its flights across the US today, sparking chaos. In an alert circulated in the past few minutes, Uncle Sam's Federal Aviation Administration said an unspecified IT glitch has halted all American Airlines flights traveling in and out of Chicago O'Hare, Dallas-Fort …

  1. Your alien overlord - fear me

    Miami airport - MIA. Is that Missing in Airport, all AA planes?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    American Airlines?

    No loss then. In fact the Aviation world would be a better place without AA (and UA for that matter)

    AC because I have to deal with their TITSUP's almost every day.

    1. PeterGriffin
      Coat

      Re: American Airlines?

      So quit posting here and go fix it!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: American Airlines?

        I don't work for AA but have to clear up their mess on a regular basis. Most of their services are outsourced. What I do has nothing to do with their mainframes (thankfully)

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. Alistair
    Windows

    Perfect pic for the article

    Something chose the wrong day to quit.

    1. Down not across

      Re: Perfect pic for the article

      Roger Roger. Oveur over.

    2. WraithCadmus
      Trollface

      Re: Perfect pic for the article

      It's good, but I propose this one instead.

  4. jamesb2147

    "Major Airports"

    That's a bit of a misnomer.

    ORD, DFW, and MIA are all AA *hubs* which is actually vastly more important than just being a "major airport." In fact, they're AA's three BIGGEST hubs!! Basically, AA has a handful of less major hubs left (if they're still operational, which I'm not confident of). Those would be places like PHX, PHL, CLT, and LAX.

    1. Allan George Dyer
      Headmaster

      Re: "Major Airports"

      Not a misnomer at all, it is a port for air traffic, and, offhand, I can't think of a superlative other than "major" that wouldn't sound odd ("transcendent airport", "dazzling airport"...?).

      At least they avoided the wheel-related puns, or maybe I spoke too soon.

  5. Shane8
    Joke

    Maybe a sysadmin accidentally sent the windows update to upgrade all computers to windows 10 ?

    ...as if these computers would be actually running windows 7 by now...

  6. Bucky 2

    I hate it when the fail-over fails to fail over.

    1. Midnight

      Some times it just over-fails.

  7. kain preacher

    Wait wasn't AA that flew the wrong plane over the Pacific ?

    1. SkippyBing

      Yup, although that wasn't IT related, the captain just failed to notice ETOPS wasn't written on any of the aircraft's paperwork. Or the aircraft. To be fair an easier mistake to make than you'd think.

      1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

        It wasn't the captain who scheduled that aircraft for that service though. That's a mistake that should be impossible to make.

        1. Richard 26

          And indeed an AA spokesman said: "We are checking our internal procedures, everything that led up to the departure. We are going to figure out what we can do better. We have gone back and made some changes to software systems."

      2. kain preacher

        So what you are saying AA has redundancies for it's fuck up It the computer does not work fuck we go back too pen and miss label flights.

  8. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Coat

    Maybe they bought a bit too much into the "disruptive technology" marketspeak ?

    Or they tried the Cloud ?

    1. TheOtherHobbes

      Airline yells at cloud.

      Perfect.

    2. Robert Helpmann??
      Childcatcher

      Disruptive Tech

      Maybe they bought a bit too much into the "disruptive technology" marketspeak?

      Based on the quote in the article, "We have resolved connectivity issues that led to a ground stop today at our Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth and Miami hubs," my guess is that all of their machines were running Windows 7 or 8 and were automatically upgraded to 10 at which point all of their settings were changed to the Win10 defaults including those for Windows firewall. Perhaps it was something else, but it is scary to me how plausible that sounds.

  9. Notas Badoff
    Angel

    Software half-life

    I realized during one of these snafus a few years ago that I had no reason to fear - anything I'd contributed to United's or Continental's portfolios of whoa woes had to have aged out of their systems by at least a decade or two since. I didn't need to duck anymore - that code was long gone.

    Now I can just sit back and know, smiling, that what the fools replaced it with was much worse than anything I'd perpetrated!

    1. launcap Silver badge

      Re: Software half-life

      > anything I'd contributed to United's or Continental's portfolios of whoa woes

      > had to have aged out of their systems by at least a decade or two

      I suspect some of the middleware code I worked on while at Galileo in the early 90s might still be in place[1]. Which is a pretty scary thought.

      [1] Assuming they are still using TPF

  10. x 7

    whats the betting its a duff update to the tablets holding the flight plans......if so, we've been there before

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Perhaps this is due to integration with US Airways systems... somebody flipped a switch too soon?

  12. Neoc

    Have they tried turning it off and back on again?

  13. Spaceman Spiff

    The last time I flew American Airlines, I flew to Tucson AZ. My bags ended up in Montreal! Never again AA! I fly Southwest whenever I can!

  14. 9Rune5
    Coat

    Tinyint overflow

    Bah, I can spot the reason a mile away!

    In big friendly letters on their webpage they ask people to allocate travel plans for no less than 2015 vacation days!

    I have problems allocating a 14 days vacation, let alone 2015...

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