Airlines Work to Catch Up to the Digital Age

nytimes.com

8 points·edw519··6 comments

For all the crappiness, you do have to appreciate the difficulty and complexity of swapping out these systems more or less on the fly.

Yeah, and add to that the scale of replacement, and that they need to interoperate and their users need to handle multiple versions in multiple locations... it's a nasty problem.

I feel their pain, but I still must ask "why not earlier?". It's not an entirely unreasonable question, though I'm glad it's underway.

At the risk of being flippant, it seems obvious and the article even mentioned it. The airlines are short of cash, and new technology on this scale is not cheap (or quick or easy). I'd bet the airlines are big believers in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

And in the meantime people like flying less and less, and seek alternatives.

There's the distinct possibility that the pains of flying are the cause of the shortness of cash. And given what a few choice pieces of bad press has done to some airlines, and that updating a few things would make the problems less likely to occur, the implication that funds have been misspent is pretty easy to derive.

It's not cheap nor easy, I fully agree. And it sucks. But might they have done some of the smaller things sooner, possibly preventing their downturn?

"... and their users need to handle multiple versions in multiple locations ..."

Man, I get crotchety just by going to different King Soopers (Kroger) stores in my area and having to deal with variations in "swipe your card" terminals and protocols.

Ya know what bugs me most about those card-swipes?

Two or three brands make nearly all of them in my area. And even within the brand, buttons / locations / workflow changes. WTF?

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