It could have been an unintentional bug. Maybe many years ago, it was written to management specs and worked perfectly, for the number of flights, personnel, etc. that they were working with at the time. But here we are, maybe 20 or 30 years later, and the numbers have increased quite a bit and some program was not updated to handle them. Who knows. But if it was something like that, we would now call it a "bug", at least until somebody figured out what to do about it.
Several years ago, Comair (which does not exist any more) had a problem like that right around Christmas time. There were a lot of weather related delays, or something, I don't remember exactly, but there was some program in their reservation system that had a numeric field that kept up with reservation numbers or something, and it was incremented by one every time a new reservation was entered, and all the rescheduling that was done caused that field to be incremented up to the maximum value, and the it rolled over back to zero, and caused the whole thing to crash. It took their programmers a couple of days to figure it out and fix it. In the meantime, people were stuck at the Cincinnati airport just like they have been stuck at some of these airports last week because of Southwest's problems.
One noteworthy thing that happened was that a bunch of airport employees got together and put together a real nice Christmas dinner for all the people stuck at the airport. That was very nice of them. I hope somebody did the same thing for the Southwest customers.
I have been a pretty good fan of Southwest myself for almost 30 years. I hope they get this fixed.
On Thursday, December 29, 2022 at 03:39:28 PM EST, Chuck Trites <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Seriously? Your blaming a programmer that probably wrote that code decades ago following management specs? Ya, all of a sudden "it's a bug"
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On Tue, Dec 27, 2022 at 9:41 PM, Edwin Clements<[log in to unmask]> wrote: Whether Southwest Airlines is still using the HP3000 or not, my take on this would be that if they are having some kind of problems getting their pilots scheduled, or whatever it is, it is a software / programming bug of some kind, not a hardware problem.
Although I would also say that given the craziness of the weather over the last few days, who knows what could be going on.
Have a great day!
Edwin Clements (859) 379-5238
https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinclements
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