American Airlines is boarding flights again after nationwide groundstop

I also like Delta and have forgiven them for that episode, but many of us flying that day didn't make it to our destinations until several days later (in many cases too late for the purpose of the trip). I was flying home from a work conference and was lucky that I woke up early, saw my flight was cancelled within an hour of the incident starting, and immediately booked on another airline. I got home 6 hours later than intended, but at least I got home the same day.

The alternatives that Delta booked for me were already going to be the next morning (Saturday), and I followed them after getting home: while the first leg worked fine, the second leg was cancelled late Saturday morning. It's likely that I'd have received yet another rebooking, but if that one also involved two legs it could easily have pushed my return date to Sunday, and by that point in the weekend I doubt I could have found openings on other airlines if I'd changed my mind.

I had coworkers who didn't make it back home from that conference until Monday night.

So yes, I think they tried hard to avoid inconveniencing people, but if you made it the same day you were lucky. Many didn't.

Doesn't seem easy at all if you've trained people, and they have practiced, on software and not on paper. Mistakes can be fatal.

Generally? Definitely.

On short notice and without pilots having any experience in doing it? That’s another hole in the Swiss cheese.

You either do something manually all the time, or you automate it and declare it a critical system. Half measures of automation kill people in Aviation.

You can't simply roll back because the old ways required the use of phone lines and fax systems and record types and workflows that literally no longer exist.

That said, the critical plane flying and ground handling stuff (like loading cargo for proper balance) is well practiced and understood enough to run fine with ad-hoc paper records albeit it would reduce operational tempo.

It's putting the right luggage in the right place, making sure the right plane gets its poo pumped, making sure the cleaning crew knows what to do and where to go, recording maintenance needs and activities on anything that doesn't fly, etc, etc that doesn't have redundancy or good fallback plans or people/managers who understand how their jobs fit into the context well enough to improvise effectively and even if they could the B rate people you had design all your corporate process didn't account for that sort of stuff so people would be risking their jobs if they couldn't do sign offs on the company ipads and whatnot.

Weight and balance isn't simply a matter of add up the weight of all cargo on paper. You need to load the plane in a reasonably laid out way and the whole result dictates how you take off. Being wrong or winging it could easily mean a catastrophic failure when trying to take off.

Around 25 years ago I worked the PoS at a retail establishment. We ran all credit card payments using a machine that would dial-up our payment processor for each transaction. It used the same line as the fax, so if we were receiving or sending a many-page fax this operation would fail. Sometimes it failed for other reasons.

As a backup we had the old carbon slips that went into a plastic rig and made an impression of the customer's card. We also had a printed out sales tax table and some more carbon slips we could use to hand-write a receipt. I had to resort to the paper based system on many occasions.

A few years back I was in a store shopping when the power went out. The staff didn't know what to do and closed the store early. They had no way to sell me the items in my basket. I asked if they could take an impression of my card and got met with blank stares. They couldn't even take cash because they didn't know how to calculate the total amount, had nothing to write a receipt on, and their cash drawers wouldn't open anyway.

Nowadays credit cards don't even come with raised numbers...

Much of the reason that commercial aviation is as safe as it is is the prioritization of safety over mission completion in the face of uncertainty. If you have uncertainty in any of the dispatch software or other dispatch items, as a passenger, I'm perfectly happy to wait until they get things sorted out rather than having this hypothetically trained staff manually executing alternative procedures that are unusual to them in order to get me to my destination a couple hours earlier...

I guarantee you that they have numerous continuity plans that probably get activated often, and because they have them, you don’t see any issues. It’s only when something happens far outside of those plans that it becomes visible. It’s confirmation bias.

W/B is something calculated before takeoff and wouldn't affect planes already in the air or with the W/B already loaded into the FMS.

I presume planes are in the air any time a problem is discovered with any system.

I know Sabre, one of the largest GDS (and originally a spinoff of AA), has fully migrated off mainframe.

Curious if AA and other airlines have as well.