GAO: airline IT outages happen virtually every month
As many frustrated travelers can attest to, unexpected IT glitches are the most annoying cause of widespread flight delays.
It is a seemingly becoming more frequent too, with about one happening every month on average.
Most of these are significant enough to cause flight disruption, says the Government Accountability Office.
The GAO said it recorded 34 outages from 2015 through 2017 and 85% of these led to cancelations or flight delays.
The GAO report found five outages led to more than 800 delays or cancellations, and IT glitches affected 11 out of the 12 airlines it monitored over the two year period.
It reviewed Alaska Airlines, American, Delta, United, Frontier, JetBlue, Spirit, Southwest, Virgin America, ExpressJet, SkyWest and Hawaiian.
At least 14 of the outages resulted in a ground stop, causing all inbound and outbound flights to be halted at a particular airport.
"Representatives from one airline stated that operational effects from airline IT outages are comparable to severe weather events, although outages occur much less frequently," the report said.
"By contrast, disruptions from weather may be forecast ahead of time allowing airlines to prepare for predicted disruptions, including accommodating customers, adjusting flight crews and schedules, and pre-positioning aircraft, according to the same representative."
The report focused on systems outages that ultimately affected the passenger experience either through flight disruption or in other related ways such as impacting online reservations and check-in systems.
Having sifted through all the airlines’ contract of carriage terms, none of them have specific reference to IT systems shutdowns although passenger rights and compensation for delays and cancelations are covered.
An outage at Delta Air Lines dragged on for days in 2016 causing losses of about $150 million, and 400 flights were cancelled just a couple of weeks ago due to a GPS related outage.
Despite the frequency, there were very few customer complaints specifically about technical issues.
The department of transportation received just 126 complaints, the report said.
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Editor for TravelMole North America and Asia pacific regions. Ray is a highly experienced (15+ years) skilled journalist and editor predominantly in travel, hospitality and lifestyle working with a huge number of major market-leading brands. He has also cover in-depth news, interviews and features in general business, finance, tech and geopolitical issues for a select few major news outlets and publishers.
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