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Wire & Cable ASIA – November/December 2016
From the Americas
As Kevin Bai, a Beijing-based analyst with the CRU Group,
told Bloomberg, more tariffs in developed countries will not
hurt Chinese steelmakers because their exports go mainly
to Asian countries while they seek new business in Africa
and the Middle East. As for Russian producers, according
to Kirill Chuyko – a strategist at BCS Global Markets,
Moscow’s largest brokerage – low production costs mean
they are able to make money despite tariffs because they
can reroute shipments to more distant markets.
Telecom
Heavily dependent on their
communications systems, USA airlines
have found themselves grounded by very
minor glitches
“The big computer systems that get airplanes, passengers
and baggage to their destinations every day are having a
bad summer.”
Annalyn Kurtz, writing in the New York Times, easily proved
her point. In an update to an on-going midsummer story,
she reported that Delta Air Lines was working to reset
its operations after a power failure at its Atlanta hub, the
world’s busiest, led to cancelled flights and delays that left
passengers stranded in airports. Around 1,000 of 6,000
Delta flights were scratched, the airline said. Recovery
efforts, begun in the morning, continued into the evening,
and cancellations were still being posted the following day.
(“Delta Malfunction on Land Keeps a Fleet of Planes From
the Sky,” 8th August)
As described in the Times, the “latest debacle” commenced
when the failure of a piece of electrical equipment shut
down Delta’s computer systems worldwide, setting off
a cascade of paralysing events. A similar scenario had
played out at Southwest Airlines three weeks earlier, when
a notebook-size router failed at a data centre in Dallas,
causing some 2,300 cancelled flights over four days.
Last year, malfunctions in United Airlines computer systems
grounded hundreds of flights; and American Airlines
experienced delays after a bug in its iPad software meant
that pilots did not have accurate airport maps.
In every case the precipitating malfunction seems slight
in comparison with the consequences. The Delta culprit
was a switchgear, similar to a circuit-breaker installed as a
safety measure in a private home. The Southwest electrical
breakdown was remedied in only an hour, noted Ms Kurtz,
but it took 13 hours to reboot the computer systems. Why,
she wondered, were backup systems not equal to the
challenge?
“In the case of Delta, whatever occurred was clearly a
catastrophic failure, and it is alarming that the backup
system didn’t kick in,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry
analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, told Ms Kurtz. Delta
said that some of its critical operations had failed to switch
over to backup systems. Southwest said that its in-place
backup system did not trigger, as intended, when the router
failed.
As the morning of 8th August wore on, and the effects of
the Delta breakdown were being felt in airports nationwide
and overseas, the system began slowly to reboot. While the
costs to Delta have not yet been published, Southwest has
said its malfunction of 20th July will cost the company tens
of millions of dollars.
Backup processors need real-time data
Airlines were among the early adopters of information
technology (IT), building electronic reservation systems in
the 1960s. But according to Bob Offutt, principal of Travel
Technology Consulting and former chief architect at Sabre,
the world’s largest computer reservations system, their
systems have been rebuilt over the years. Given the high
volume of transactions, he told the Times , the airlines’ data
should be backed up continuously.
Mr Offutt said that, while airlines have secondary systems
in place – to provide emergency power, for example – their
data is backed up not in real time but only a few times a
day. Thus, even after a malfunctioning router or power
source is fixed, it can take hours to bring the systems back
online. Noting that the systems are very complicated, he
made an important distinction: “It may be that they have a
backup processor but not backup data.”
Ms Kurtz pointed out that major airlines primarily use
third-party processors like Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport
to distribute their real-time flight data to travel booking sites
such as Expedia and Travelocity.
The airlines also, she wrote, contract with these services
to run their internal reservations systems as well as their
departure control systems for processing last-minute
bookings, seat assignments and boarding.
Delta, for instance, uses an in-house system to process
passenger services and flight operations, but the system
infrastructure is run by Travelport at its Atlanta data centre.
Southwest uses Sabre for its domestic reservations and
Amadeus for its international bookings, although it is in the
process of migrating everything to the Amadeus system.
 Pointing out that each passenger on each flight
represents a separate log and multiple transactions
(seat assignment, meal preference, child requirements,
frequent-flier number, etc), Andrea Huguely, a
spokeswoman for Sabre, supplied context for these
responsibilities. Every minute, she told the Times, the
Sabre system processes 164,000 requests and some
$250,000 worth of travel spending.
 Ms Kurtz wrote, “Airlines, of course, are only one of
many industries with complex systems whose failure can
be catastrophic.” Many companies, like banks and large
financial traders, manage the risk by copying data to
service areas powered by different data centres, so that
they can continue working in the event of a malfunction.
But to thousands of stranded travellers who on 8th
August could do nothing but cool their heels for hours
in Delta boarding lounges, the airlines industry is the
one needing most urgently to solve its communications
issues.