Computer outage delays United flights at O’Hare
An outage of United’s check-in system caused delays at Chicago’s O’Hare earlier today, as reported by Chicago Breaking News:
FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said that United had ordered a ground stop of its planes on its own that ended at 7:55 a.m. The problem began about 5:15 a.m., she said.
United had told the FAA that it was a computer issue that made the airline unable to check in people for flights and resulted in an inability to get final flight information to the cockpit, Cory said.
“I only remember in my 10 years one other time” that computer glitches have caused this much trouble with flights, Cory said.
By about 9 a.m., an airline spokeswoman said that it was manually checking in travelers through mobile units and laptop computers to facilitate check-in for as many customers as possible, Szadokierski said. To get around the computer glitch, agents at the check-counters also called agents at other airport to have them check in travelers, with O’Hare agents then writing out boarding passes, she said.
The problems have since been addressed, but it took several hours and caused significant delays and some cancellations for travelers shortly before the beginning of 4th of July weekend. Larger-scale flight delays at major airports tend to have ripple effects, as schedules at many other connecting airports become affected.
This is also really expensive. In 2007 alone, flight delays were estimated to have cost the economy more than $40B.
Software testing results in over 100 parking tickets
Tom Feddor, whose Illinois license plate is “0″ has received more than 100 ticket notices from the City of Chicago, as reported by the Chicago Tribune:
A glitch occurred at the Chicago Department of Revenue involving Feddor’s 0 plates being used during tests of ticketing equipment. The error prompted the cascade of ticket notices to land in his mailbox, city officials determined after launching an internal investigation based on calls from the Tribune.
Apparently, the City of Chicago used Feddor’s license plate number to perform tests on their electronic ticket issuing system:
It turned out that some city parking-enforcement aides punched in 0 when testing their electronic ticket-issuing devices, Revenue Department spokesman Ed Walsh said. Officials weren’t aware there was a 0 plate or that Feddor was receiving tickets, Walsh said in response to the Tribune inquiry.
“The test violations should have been dismissed in the database. The majority of the cases [Feddor] contested successfully. But we are taking steps to rectify the situation so in the future an actual registered plate number will not be used to do the testing,” Walsh said.
There seem to be a number of risky technical issues here, such as as performing testing on live customer data, not checking whether the plate is currently in use, and of course actually issuing tickets to the customer.
Found via Near Loop Wire.
