But hey it's cheaper if we don't change it right? /s
(and I kinda can agree with this, like 10% because they might end contracting with some bigger IT company that doesn't care about shipping something that works)
Modernizing such a system would take enormous political + real capital. The new system would undoubtedly have many growing pains as formerly resolved problems were not covered in the new system. It’s no surprise nobody would want to touch such a system.
I've worked with airline scheduling software at almost the scale of United (about half the size, for the largest customer). That was using an Oracle database, which was a bit of a pain and a big expense, but worked fine as long as there was competent admins and competent devs. Would Couchbase be disaster-proof even when run by clowns?
Not saying there aren't better and worse choices for databases in any given situation. Just saying that there are lots of them that work perfectly well in competent hands.
If they've resorted to doing all their scheduling manually with pen and paper, any data pushed to the edge (air crews, ground staff etc) will need to be transmitted in a similarly manual fashion.
The gate/ground/air crews are not making autonomous decisions about who is flying what, when and where. That is decided by some ops/crew control structure in the airline.
Unions fight to keep a lot of data from being automated instead of manual because the automated data can be used to build individual performance metrics. For example, some baggage handling unions fought against bag scanners because then you could tell how much work different union members did.
They’re trying to keep from getting optimized to death like an Amazon warehouse worker.
Unfortunately that same automated data is really useful for dealing with situations like this. Once the manually entered data is out of sync with the real world the errors compound and you have cascading failures.
i believe this story. the scheduling system is too fragile and can’t automatically pick up disruptions to crew movement. they’re still manually scheduling some crews, but I think their main problem is they don’t have a way of knowing which crews are where and therefore can’t schedule flights. and it’s not every single piece that’s going to take 30 days, but it seems pretty likely that some bags will be lost that long.