No Smooth Takeoff for US Airways IT Conversion

Computerworld - Inflexible legacy systems were partly to blame for glitches at US Airways Group Inc.’s self-service check-in kiosks early last month, according to an e-mail sent to frequent fliers by an executive at the company. The problems led to long lines and delayed flights at some East Coast airports.

The kiosk glitches were tied to the launch of a common reservation system for the operations of US Airways and America West Airlines, which merged two years ago under the name US Airways Group.

During the first weekend in March, US Airways was switched from Sabre Holdings Corp.’s reservation system to one Electronic Data Systems Corp. built for America West.

But when US Airways’ 7 million reservations were transferred to the America West system, about 1.5 million “didn’t ‘sync up’ correctly, and our agents had to hand-process each reservation,” H. Travis Christ, the airline’s vice president of sales and marketing, wrote in his March 23 e-mail. “Many systems that were otherwise ready to go became bogged down.”

Mainframe-based reservation systems such as those used by US Airways and America West “are very reliable but very inflexible,” Christ added. “It’s as though we’re fighting with one hand tied behind our back.”

Held Back by IT

Joe Beery, US Airways Group’s CIO, said in an interview that there’s nothing wrong with mainframes per se. “It’s the framework and how the architecture of the systems is built that really hold us back,” Beery said.

Both Beery and Christ acknowledged that US Airways will ultimately have to move to a more up-to-date reservation system. “We can’t continue to operate forever using technology that was developed in, and ties us to, the 1970s,” Christ said. But, the two executives noted, a new system that could meet all of the company’s needs doesn’t yet exist.

The check-in problems occurred on March 4 and 5. Most of the affected passengers were at Charlotte Douglas International Airport in Charlotte, N.C., according to US Airways officials. But travel at other locations, including Boston’s Logan International Airport, was also disrupted.

“There are two issues here,” said Bob Mann, an analyst at R.W. Mann & Co. in Port Washington, N.Y. “One issue is migration from one [system] to another, which was problematic. The other is the functionality of legacy systems vs. new-generation systems.”

Like Beery and Christ, Mann said no replacement systems are available now that could meet all the reservation needs of a large airline. “If one existed, everyone would be standing in line for it,” he said.

Henry Harteveldt, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said both Sabre and EDS have modernized their systems to some degree to make use of service-oriented architecture and Web services technologies. But the systems still aren’t as flexible as airlines would like, he added.