Experts such as Bill Curtis, senior vice president and chief scientist at CAST, which analyzes software for large companies, suspects a glitch in the software that runs the airline's complex computer systems.
Airline computers juggle multiple systems that must interact to control gate, reservations, ticketing and frequent fliers. Each of those pieces may have been written separately by different companies, Curtis said. Even if an airline has backup systems, the software running those likely has the same coding flaw, he said.
Although the source of a power failure is fairly simple to identify, tracking down a software flaw can be harder.“It’s like investigating crime; there is a lot of data they’ve got to sift through to figure out what actually happened,” Curtis said.
“There’s really no good explanation for it,” said Robert Mann, an industry analyst at R.W. Mann & Co. and former airline executive. “I suspect there will be a lot of internal review, as well. You can’t do business without the front end working.”
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| Delta became the latest airline |
“This smells like it triggered something that was a problem in the software,” Curtis said. “You think you’ve got it all worked out, but these things are so large and so complex that you’ve still made some assumptions and every once in a while those assumptions bite you."
Although the source of a power failure is fairly simple to identify, tracking down a software flaw can be harder.“It’s like investigating crime; there is a lot of data they’ve got to sift through to figure out what actually happened,” Curtis said.
“There’s really no good explanation for it,” said Robert Mann, an industry analyst at R.W. Mann & Co. and former airline executive. “I suspect there will be a lot of internal review, as well. You can’t do business without the front end working.”
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