[HN Gopher] Southwest Airlines grounds its entire fleet amid gia...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Southwest Airlines grounds its entire fleet amid giant computer
       outage
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 106 points
       Date   : 2021-06-15 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nypost.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nypost.com)
        
       | bokohut wrote:
       | A physical process unable to reach the clouds which has been
       | prevented by a logical process maintained in the clouds.
       | 
       | Who's on first. What's on second. I don't knows on third. Where
       | are the clouds?
        
       | ta1234567890 wrote:
       | Hope they recover quickly. Southwest, in my experience, is the
       | local (US) airline with the best customer service by far. And one
       | of the best in the world.
        
         | mrandish wrote:
         | Having flown SouthWest hundreds of times, their performance is
         | quite good when things work. However, in my experience, when
         | things fail their performance suffers worse than several other
         | airlines. It think it's because they intentionally run their
         | systems to maximize efficiency which means less resilience to
         | unexpected failures.
         | 
         | Years ago, they compensated for this with generally lower
         | prices. However, in more recent years, I've noticed their
         | pricing isn't nearly as advantageous compared to competitors.
         | Yes, if you're one of the first 20% to book a flight six weeks
         | in advance, and can accept little flexibility in terms, and are
         | willing to go at a less desirable time, there are still deals
         | to be had. But in any other scenario I've found United,
         | American, Delta, etc to sometimes actually be cheaper, which
         | was previously rarely the case.
        
           | tyingq wrote:
           | A mostly point to point flying network is also harder to
           | recover than a mostly hub and spoke one.
        
       | lurquer wrote:
       | Getting more fragile by the day.
       | 
       | An airline that can't fly planes due to a third-parties weather
       | app. (Which, for all we know, is dependent on other third-party
       | apps.)
       | 
       | These problems will grow exponentially.
       | 
       | Just wait until Company A goes offline because it relies on
       | Company B, which goes offline due to Company C, which (and this
       | is where the fun begins...) goes offline because of Company A.
        
         | awb wrote:
         | If it's a circular dependency then you still need an external
         | event at some point to bring the system down.
         | 
         | I guess what you're saying is what if the weather app crashes
         | both Southwest and Kayak. And once the weather app goes back
         | online if Southwest and Kayak were both dependent on each other
         | then they couldn't recover even though the original cause had
         | been resolved.
        
       | yupper32 wrote:
       | I never understand people's expectations of companies during
       | stuff like this.
       | 
       | There are people complaining that they can't get through to
       | customer service on their phone. Like, do they expect them to
       | always have enough customer service capacity for when _every
       | single customer_ in the world has reason to call them? That 'd be
       | insane.
       | 
       | Flight cancelations are always a risk when flying. You need to
       | always expect that you'll potentially have to be stuck somewhere
       | for a night or two. If the airport floor doesn't suffice for you,
       | fly airlines that have a track record of giving hotels for
       | cancelations and have insurance/funds to cover a few nights if
       | you aren't able to get a room from the airline.
       | 
       | This kind of stuff is unavoidable and just part of air travel. Be
       | prepared, be patient.
        
         | FabHK wrote:
         | Absolutely agreed. The airline industry has become victim of
         | its own success there in a way. Planes are so amazingly safe
         | and reliable and even punctual by and large that people forget
         | that it's not just a bus going from A to B, and how miraculous
         | it really is. (Some stand-up comedian had a bit about that, I
         | thought it was George Carlin, but I don't find it.) ETA: Louis
         | C K, yes, thanks.
        
         | awillen wrote:
         | You're saying that from the perspective of someone who's not
         | currently stranded at an airport. Your points are valid, but I
         | think the irony is your expectations aren't reasonable.
         | 
         | These are people stuck in strange places who are anxious and
         | uncomfortable. Some of them are probably going to miss
         | important things. Others have to worry about kids/pets/etc.
         | That's not to say they shouldn't be patient (and certainly they
         | shouldn't be taking their frustrations out on the airline
         | staff), but you're demanding rationality from people in the
         | exact sort of situation where it can be really, really
         | difficult for someone to be entirely rational.
         | 
         | They're trying to do what they can (call customer service) and
         | find themselves helpless - that's not a situation where they're
         | going to reason through the economics of call center staffing.
        
           | yupper32 wrote:
           | > You're saying that from the perspective of someone who's
           | not currently stranded at an airport.
           | 
           | I'm saying it from the perspective of someone who has been
           | stranded at an airport. It's very easy to chill tf out for a
           | while and wait in line for a while at the service desk to see
           | what you've got to work with. You're not dying, it's not
           | literal fight or flight. You're just stuck for a while.
           | 
           | > Your points are valid, but I think the irony is your
           | expectations aren't reasonable.
           | 
           | I don't think it's reasonable to scream at service reps,
           | which I guarantee will happen to nearly every single
           | Southwest rep today. I've seen it so many times.
           | 
           | And it's the people who are confused why the customer service
           | lines are jammed, those who are irrational, who are more
           | likely to be the screamers. That's mainly who my comment was
           | directed at.
        
         | jcims wrote:
         | The retail veneer is a powerful edifice. Folks that don't have
         | any experience with building or operating or manufacturing
         | things at scale really have no conceptual footing on just how
         | difficult it is. As a result, at least in my opinion, there's
         | no reservoir of empathy to tap when things don't go according
         | to plan.
        
         | makerofspoons wrote:
         | Not having enough human capacity for a random event is
         | reasonable enough, but between their app and their website
         | there should be a smooth, automated, and easy way for customers
         | to rebook or get their money back to book with another airline.
         | That shouldn't require going through a person, especially if
         | there are not enough people available.
        
           | ksdale wrote:
           | How long should that take, for every single person doing
           | business with a company to change their plans?
        
             | makerofspoons wrote:
             | If you give users the right self-service options, they'll
             | resolve it for themselves between the start of the outage
             | and when they expected to fly. They'll rebook or take their
             | money and go.
        
               | sjm-lbm wrote:
               | I'd assume a nontrivial number of customers are calling
               | because automated methods to reschedule aren't giving
               | them the options that they want, and they assume
               | (probably incorrectly) that they will do better when
               | talking to a human.
               | 
               | I don't know with Southwest, but I know more than one
               | airline has a system that sends automatic "choose one of
               | these options" emails when flights are cancelled. When
               | _all of your customers_ need new flights, though, the
               | issue isn 't how the rescheduling is done, it's the fact
               | that almost nobody is going to be able to choose an
               | option they like.
        
               | MattGaiser wrote:
               | > they assume (probably incorrectly) that they will do
               | better when talking to a human.
               | 
               | Anecdotally, it has worked enough times for me to
               | call/talk to an agent vs dealing with the automated
               | suggestion system. Just don't be a jerk.
               | 
               | One automated system gave me a next flight of the
               | following day. Spoke to an agent and was rerouted through
               | another hub and only delayed by two hours overall.
               | 
               | In another case, a delayed flight caused me to miss my
               | connection. Was officially told that I was out of luck
               | and would have to wait (as were the jerks who asked) for
               | the morning. I went and got a seat on the plane out that
               | night.
        
               | nradov wrote:
               | In my experience if you complain enough the human agent
               | will occasionally agree to rebook you on another airline
               | even when the online system doesn't show that as an
               | option.
        
           | corobo wrote:
           | Would these be working during the giant computer outage?
        
           | ihsw wrote:
           | Have you flown with them? They have an absurd priority queue
           | system at the in-person flight check-in desk that always
           | bumps the normal queue, eg: if there is a constant stream of
           | people in the priority queue then the normal queue will be in
           | a stand-still until the priority queue is drained.
           | 
           | It's completely asinine, especially since there are some
           | services that cannot be done except at their in-person flight
           | check-in desk.
           | 
           | Poor planning is one thing but piss-poor customer service is
           | rule rather than the exception. Not only that but this level
           | of service extends all the way up the chain at Southwest
           | Airlines -- walk right up to the line of bare minimum and
           | piss all over it.
           | 
           | It is no surprise that their system is poorly orchestrated
           | and I am sure the decision-making parties will be happy to
           | shove large sacks of cash in the direction of Accenture and
           | Cognizant rather than employ competent teams.
        
         | joe_the_user wrote:
         | People in shock don't think about the wider issues.
         | 
         | "I never understand people's expectations of other people's
         | expectations..." Well, I guess I feel I understand that too.
         | 
         | "Be prepared, be patient..." Good advice, so is "don't have a
         | global outage" but do people follow it? Nooooo
        
           | yupper32 wrote:
           | > Good advice, so is "don't have a global outage" but do
           | people follow it?
           | 
           | People on HN should understand better than anyone that this
           | isn't really possible over a long enough period of time. It's
           | not like Southwest has to ground its fleet every other month.
           | This specifically is a very very rare event.
        
           | faeyanpiraat wrote:
           | Whenever you go on longer trips you need to do at least some
           | disaster planning, otherwise you'll get in some wild
           | inconvenience sometime
        
             | joe_the_user wrote:
             | What can you plan for exactly if you plane gets diverted to
             | nowhere's ville?
             | 
             | Should you be carrying a tent and three days food and
             | water? That would add to your carrying ons. The only thing
             | I can think of is not making appointments on the other side
             | where your life is screwed if your plane is diverted. But
             | how much you can do that or need to do that varies by
             | person.
        
         | monksy wrote:
         | People's experiences are mared by bad behavior on the airlines.
         | Most airlines lock you into whatever you bought and put so many
         | restrictions on it that it's ridicious. (extremely high change
         | fees, baggage fees, etc) They give you a false option that you
         | can buy out of these things. (Paying more money.. but often
         | those options are obscenely over priced)
         | 
         | Different airlines handle misconnects differently: Delta
         | sometimes auto rebooks, United and US Airways required you to
         | call and rebook.. although US Airways required you to work with
         | the gate or call before hand and you got issued a new ticket at
         | the kisok. On top of this.. there are different rules you
         | aren't explained about what conditions indicate you can break
         | the ticket without being penalized. (Schedule change being one)
         | 
         | Lastly, theres the effect of that the airline never takes
         | responsibility when they screw up. It's always "eh you should
         | know better" .. Leftouthansa sends your bags to EWR on a FRA-
         | LHR-ORD flight? Maybe you'll get your bags in 48 hours? Don't
         | forget to ask for an amenity kit (that's on you to ask for).
         | Bag got lost and you want reimburstment? Please keep your
         | recepts from years ago for the jeans you had in there.
        
         | forinti wrote:
         | I often see people mad about a delay because they booked a
         | flight in order to get to a meeting an hour or two after
         | arriving when the car trip would be at least a day long.
        
         | robotresearcher wrote:
         | When you've travelled 30 times in a row with near-perfect QoS,
         | your expectations get recalibrated. It's an ironic effect of
         | success that your customers become less tolerant of failure.
         | 
         | It's the Louis C.K. bit about being (roughly) 'in a chair in
         | the sky at 500mph: it's a miracle yet no one's happy'.
        
           | JBiserkov wrote:
           | from the same clip "How quickly the world owes him something
           | he didn't knew existed 5 minutes ago?"
        
           | tyingq wrote:
           | I chuckle a bit when people complain about the slow satellite
           | based wifi. So, you're in a metal tube, miles in the air,
           | going 500mph, getting internet from a satellite 20,000 miles
           | away. And...the wifi is a bit slow?
        
         | moralestapia wrote:
         | >do they expect them to always have enough customer service
         | capacity for when every single customer in the world has reason
         | to call them?
        
         | monksy wrote:
         | > fly airlines that have a track record of giving hotels for
         | cancelations
         | 
         | In the US those are? United, Delta, and American for the most
         | part don't. They'll look for any reason to claim WX issue so
         | they won't pay out.
        
           | yupper32 wrote:
           | That's what I put "and" and not "or" after that part of the
           | sentence. Weather is a big one that they don't usually pay
           | out for. You need to be prepared for that to happen, either
           | by being okay with the airport floor or have other ways to
           | fund a hotel stay.
           | 
           | FWIW I had United give me a hotel in 2019 after a mechanical
           | issue.
        
         | dimgl wrote:
         | Well dude, they're... stuck. They're stuck in the middle of
         | nowhere. That feels horrible no matter what happens. It
         | happened to me yesterday at MCO.
        
       | tibbydudeza wrote:
       | Seems like another ransomware event.
        
       | FearlessNebula wrote:
       | I wonder what kind of computer issue requires them to ground
       | their whole fleet? Can't the pilots just use Foreflight for the
       | weather?
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | shadowgovt wrote:
         | For liability reasons, I assume if they can't use their
         | standard systems, they can't fly.
         | 
         | Commercial flight safety is all about standardization,
         | reproducibility, and predictability. Switching the weather
         | source for the pilots violates all three of those principles.
        
           | aeternum wrote:
           | I often wonder if delays like this should also be treated as
           | some kind of safety issue.
           | 
           | Somehow we've decided that any loss of life or injury via a
           | crash is unacceptable. Yet we treat delays (both airline and
           | traffic) that cost millions of human life hours as barely
           | newsworthy.
           | 
           | Would it be better if we considered policies in terms of
           | human life hours saved rather than human lives? Is that
           | already being done?
        
             | shadowgovt wrote:
             | That's an actuarial solution. Not without merit, but IIUC
             | the thinking is the public will not abide a crash where the
             | root cause traces to "yeah it was a little unsafe, but
             | think of the time lost if we'd delayed a day!"
        
               | bombcar wrote:
               | I mean OSHA basically exists because people are really
               | REALLY bad at making the time/disaster tradeoff
               | calculation.
        
             | nwallin wrote:
             | When an airline has a crash, its stock price drops 1.58%
             | that day on average. [0] Southwest's stock is down 0.28%
             | today, and it looks like most of that drop happened
             | immediately after the market opened, well before this
             | incident, and may be related to today's stocks being down
             | 0.21% overall. At first glance it appears that investors
             | are entirely unconcerned with this delay.
             | 
             | For whatever reason, we as a society have decided that
             | airliner crashes are scarier than car crashes. Just like
             | we've decided terrorism, nuclear energy, and self driving
             | cars are scarier than they actually are. _Should_ we be
             | this way? Probably not, but this is the way the world is.
             | 
             | [0] https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1785906
        
             | jacques_chester wrote:
             | The optionality value of not being dead is surprisingly
             | high, meaning that most folks would trade 1 hour of not-
             | death for _many_ hours of not-delayed.
        
               | aeternum wrote:
               | Shouldn't the equation be how many hours of delay you
               | would trade for one hour of not-death?
               | 
               | Taken to an extreme, suppose we found 5 hours worth of
               | airline safety video prior to a flight saved 10 human
               | lives per year as it made it less likely people would
               | evacuate the plane with their belongings.
               | 
               | If you led the FAA, would you mandate each passenger
               | watch this video before each flight in order to save
               | those lives? Put another way, is 5 hours * 5 billion
               | airline passengers / year worth 10 humans lives / year?
        
               | jacques_chester wrote:
               | If I led the FAA, I'd stay the course. Being dead is
               | infinite. Delays due to safety are not.
        
             | ihumanable wrote:
             | The number of people that are ok dying to prevent "lost
             | human life hours" is probably near zero.
        
             | vajrabum wrote:
             | The risk of loss of a passenger aircraft isn't the same
             | thing as not wearing a seatbelt or being late for a party.
             | Nobody sane would want to be personally responsible for the
             | death of 200 or 300 people in one go. The FAA has a no
             | commercial aviation accident policy and I for one support
             | that policy.
        
             | noizejoy wrote:
             | I don't have numbers, but intuitively speaking: Wouldn't
             | the cost differential in saving lives come down over time
             | as the technology and procedures mature and amortize?
             | 
             | In other words, wouldn't the calculation need to be treated
             | much like any capital investment with net benefits needing
             | some time to kick in?
        
           | nwallin wrote:
           | Brings to mind the sinking of the El Faro. The captain was
           | relying on the free version of a paid weather app that gated
           | up to date information. The 12 hours out of date information
           | showed the planned/filed path to be safe, but in reality the
           | captain sailed straight into the center of a hurricane, and
           | sank with all hands.
           | 
           | Many other factors contributed to the sinking, but one of the
           | NTSB bulletpoints was to rely on official weather sources
           | only. I wonder if that directive played a role here.
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15554602
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17160396
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_El_Faro
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | You would hope, though, that what is standardized would
           | include redundancy; resiliency has to be a concern at some
           | level.
        
       | ChuckMcM wrote:
       | Hmmm.
        
       | trimbo wrote:
       | Next we'll get to hear that modernizing old software systems is
       | too hard, so they're still running COBOL on a mainframe out of a
       | single DC that had a fiber cut or something.
        
         | malux85 wrote:
         | You take your eye off the ball for 20 or 30 years and _look_
         | what happens (throws hands in air)
        
         | hughrr wrote:
         | There's a lot of that stuff out there still. I was speaking to
         | a former colleague a couple of years back and he discovered a
         | NT4 box with a Hayes modem dangling off it doing mission
         | critical EDI stuff in VB4 while doing a site migration. Not
         | come across anything that old yet. Last one was a single
         | irreplaceable VAX doing DHCP for about 200 users about ten
         | years after it should have been in a skip.
        
       | stuff4ben wrote:
       | A system that is wholly dependent upon a third party weather
       | application with no redundancies seems poorly built. I wish we'd
       | get more transparency out of airlines when "computer systems"
       | crash and cause delays. A post-mortem would be nice...
        
         | rhodozelia wrote:
         | Say people with the skills and incentives to build these
         | systems all go to faangs where they can make 500k/yr and have
         | the budget to build the system since that system is the revenue
         | generator.
         | 
         | Everywhere else it is 150k-200k a year with the bare number
         | headcount and you are a cost center and treated like one.
         | 
         | So not surprising to me that every company in the world that
         | has a large physical plant, so already has large single points
         | of failure, doesn't have redundant data centers or cloud based
         | systems.
         | 
         | Given the number of hacks anything online literally can't be
         | secured, so they are damned if they do and damned if they
         | don't.
         | 
         | One answer is to go back to analog systems, which ain't
         | happening!
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | Why would tech companies be more rational at pricing labor
           | than other companies?
           | 
           | Because that's what it is - if your entire fleet is going
           | down and you could have spent more to hire engineers, you
           | just are irrational at pricing the value of engineering
           | labor.
        
             | macintux wrote:
             | Yet every other airline is up and running, having
             | (presumably) spent roughly the same on engineers.
             | 
             | It's always easy in hindsight to say they should have spent
             | more, but opportunity cost is very real, and margins are
             | very slim.
        
               | ta991919 wrote:
               | _" Yet every other airline is up and running, having
               | (presumably) spent roughly the same on engineers"_
               | 
               | That's an odd line of thinking. Other airlines have
               | catastrophic outages too. Just at different times/dates.
               | They do sometimes share 3rd party dependencies, but that
               | happened to not be the case this time.
        
           | slg wrote:
           | I'm sorry, but it is laughable to imply that a team of
           | developers each making 200k a year can't build a stable
           | product. It also isn't like the FAANGs of the world don't
           | have downtime themselves.
        
             | bombcar wrote:
             | I was going to say the multiple failures at high profile
             | cloud systems just in the last year is enough to prove that
             | all the FAANG engineers in the world won't save you.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
           | Seems like a profit center to me if the company is 100% shut
           | down without it.
        
             | nwallin wrote:
             | Southwest's stock price seems to be unaffected by the
             | outage. Southwest is down 0.28% on the day, but most of
             | that drop happened at market open, before this incident,
             | and is probably related to the S&P 500 being down 0.21%
             | over a similar time period. Southwest's stock stabilized at
             | shortly before 10am, and is actually up almost a tenth
             | since then.
             | 
             | Seems to me the MBAs ran the numbers a while ago, and here
             | we are.
        
             | rsj_hn wrote:
             | Actually that's much closer to the definition of a cost
             | center.
             | 
             | A cost is a thing you need to pay but if you spend more on
             | it you get very little benefit. Thus it has a binary nature
             | or at least a nature where "good enough" is all you need. A
             | profit center is something where if you make it better you
             | generate more revenue. Therefore things like necessary
             | infrastructure is a cost, whereas adding more routes is a
             | profit.
             | 
             | Whereas I think you are confusing cost and profit to mean
             | "important" and "unimportant". Not having your headquarters
             | fall down is important. Having HVAC for your office workers
             | is important. But no one is going to say "Let's choose this
             | airline, have you seen how awesome the HVAC in their main
             | office is? And how the foundation to their HQ is going to
             | last a hundred years longer than their competitor?" But
             | they will say "Let's choose this airline because it has a
             | direct flight to where we want to go".
        
               | JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
               | Thank you. In retrospect, I had a feeling something was
               | off about my thinking, but I couldn't articulate where.
               | Importance and profitability are different domains. They
               | might penny pinch weather reports, and risk management
               | probably characterized it as "low risk, high impact", saw
               | "low risk" and underinvested.
        
       | SMAAART wrote:
       | Ramsonware?
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | Imagine a foreign adversary attacking flights in midair. Or
         | shutting down energy, transportation, distribution, etc.
         | 
         | We rapidly need to reframe our security posture.
        
           | mrandish wrote:
           | > Imagine a foreign adversary attacking flights in midair.
           | 
           | It would suck to have IT systems intentionally disrupted but
           | I don't think even modern airliners can plausibly fall out of
           | the sky even if they suddenly lose contact with all ground
           | based systems.
           | 
           | I think there are procedures in place even if air-traffic
           | control systems, comms or GPS fail. Last time I checked,
           | pilots can still fly the plane with their eyeballs, on-board
           | radar, compass and ground speed. In fact, I recently saw an
           | article where some senior safety pilot was concerned that
           | with all the nifty automation, today's pilots aren't getting
           | _enough_ practice doing, you know, actual flying of the
           | airplane.
        
             | bombcar wrote:
             | I'm 99% sure that losing the automatic systems would
             | immediately result in the situation foretold here:
             | https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/05/15
        
             | awb wrote:
             | Sure, but if you don't use a skill you lose it. There's a
             | lot of math I aced in school with pencil and paper that
             | I've done for years since with a calculator that would be
             | much harder for me now than it was when I originally
             | learned the skill.
        
           | pstuart wrote:
           | We need to reframe the incentives to reframe our security
           | posture.
        
           | faeyanpiraat wrote:
           | IOT could be a big issue which looks like a solution to
           | something actually noone wanted.
           | 
           | Like that twitter acc that collects stuff like a shoe that
           | needs firmware updates
        
             | ketzo wrote:
             | @internetofshit for the curious. some pretty goofy stuff.
        
       | cagenut wrote:
       | y'know between the oil pipeline, the meat processing plant, and
       | now the airlines, its feeling very like ministry-for-the-future
       | lately.
        
         | nwallin wrote:
         | Don't forget the ransomware attack at hospitals in Florida last
         | week. (AFAIK they paid the ransom)
        
       | tosh wrote:
       | tweet:
       | https://twitter.com/SouthwestAir/status/1404888980999520268?...
        
         | leesalminen wrote:
         | Dang, no update for 2+ hours. Not a good look. I expect this
         | from a GCP/AWS status page but that's about it.
        
         | travisjungroth wrote:
         | > In the meantime, Customer Service wait times might be longer
         | than normal
         | 
         | Might?
        
       | mrandish wrote:
       | Yeah, from what I understand of flight operations "inability to
       | transmit weather information" via their in-house computer system
       | shouldn't be a showstopper for thousands of flights nationwide.
       | It wasn't so long ago that pilots weather info was just a print
       | out.
       | 
       | I'm not a commercial pilot but would love if someone who is could
       | post a plausible hypothesis how this would ground the whole fleet
       | (short of a simple bureaucratic decision to shut down if
       | everything isn't working exactly normally).
        
         | imadethis wrote:
         | Each commercial flight in the US is required to file a flight
         | plan before takeoff. This flight plan is created and approved
         | by an FAA licensed dispatcher, who then tracks the progress of
         | the flight and develops alternative routing as necessary.
         | 
         | An important part of the flight plan is weather conditions
         | along the route. There are obvious safety concerns, but weather
         | conditions are also responsible for the route chosen, the
         | amount of fuel onboard the plane, and passenger comfort.
         | Without weather information, the flight plan cannot be filed
         | and the plane cannot fly. Keep in mind that there are specific
         | regulatory standards that must be met with any information
         | included in the flight plan. A pilot cannot simply open up the
         | weather app on their phone for instance. The weather info needs
         | to come from an approved source.
         | 
         | I have no specific information about Southwest's current issue,
         | but my guess is the third party service they use for weather in
         | the flight plan is out of service. If they can't transmit this
         | info to aircraft in the air or on the ground, then nobody gets
         | to fly today. I'm also guessing that an incident like this will
         | result in backup solutions being put into place, and that there
         | is an IT or systems engineer somewhere who is trying to hide
         | their "I told you so" expression.
         | 
         | Edit: an example flight plan can be found here:
         | https://www.simbrief.com/system/guide.php#ofpsample. This is
         | from a site for sim pilots, but the format of the brief is the
         | same as what a commercial airline would file for a flight.
        
           | AnimalMuppet wrote:
           | So if a plane is in flight (and I'm sure some were), and the
           | weather system goes down, then what? Stick with the previous
           | plan? Divert?
        
             | kayfox wrote:
             | In flight weather can be observed (most airliners have
             | weather radar onboard) and the pilots can check on weather
             | along their route with controllers and at the destination
             | or in specific places by electronic inquiry.
        
             | bombcar wrote:
             | In-flight weather by radio is an option but it's a manual
             | thing. And the airline may not be set up to use that except
             | an emergency situation.
        
             | imadethis wrote:
             | I don't think the equipment to receive weather updates is
             | on the Minimum Equipment List, but if dispatch couldn't
             | even update over the radio then I would imagine they would
             | start diverting flights. This is just a guess, hopefully
             | someone with more knowledge can jump in here.
        
           | mrandish wrote:
           | Thanks, that is certainly a plausible explanation - basically
           | not being able to sufficiently guarantee compliance with some
           | approved process that had a single point of failure
           | somewhere.
           | 
           | I also agree that, much like when the Space Shuttle blew up,
           | there were engineers somewhere who immediately suspected
           | exactly how and why.
        
         | kencausey wrote:
         | Pure speculation: perhaps the FAA requirements on weather
         | updates has changed since paper weather reports were standard?
         | 
         | edit: s/FFA/FAA/
        
       | papito wrote:
       | The book Release It!, listing some techniques for enterprise
       | software resiliency has airline booking systems going down as the
       | first real-world horror story, and I have to say, that is any
       | engineer's nightmare fuel.
       | 
       | I was paying attention after that.
        
       | post_break wrote:
       | They were using the darksky api too? Kidding of course, but still
       | sour grapes at Apple.
        
         | leesalminen wrote:
         | I'm what you might call an Apple fanboy but man did that tick
         | me off. We'd been integrated with dark sky for so many years
         | and had to migrate to the NWS(?) API. It's free, but so much
         | more painful to use than darksky. We lost so much functionality
         | in the process. Boo, Apple.
        
           | post_break wrote:
           | Yeah the app and the api were amazing. I guess apple extended
           | the api shutdown but man, buying it and shutting it down
           | really really pisses me off.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | etrabroline wrote:
       | I think these kinds of Cybersecurity issues will be used
       | opportunistically to justify regulations that infringe on privacy
       | and give more access to governments. I'm reminded of how the lead
       | up and aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks were
       | used to justify the PATRIOT Act.
        
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