While i sympathize, the world does rely on high quality 30+ year old software. I think it's time, as an industry, to stop seeing software as disposable and start designing for longevity.
A well maintained 30-year-old car can drive cross country. There's a big difference between car thats old with a ton of known defects that the driver works around and a car thats old that had it's defects fixed when they came up.
That being said, the reality is that requirements change. Load changes. The world around the software changes. Systems need to be resilient, yet flexible enough to be maintained but not replaced over decades.
Whilst it would be a major upheaval to switch to a clean room engineered implementation using 2025 best practices it would at least increase the talent pool that can work on it effectively.
There does likely come a point where it is cost effective to rebuild it both in reduced unplanned downtime and reduced maintenance costs.
The good news is there's always a contractor willing to promise the world and deliver something that doesn't work in 5-10 years. Your internal team, who could have finished the original job in a couple years if they'd been funded, will be the ones that end up making that delivered system actually work. But you'll tell everyone that it was the contractor's high quality output that did the trick, because saying they failed would hurt your career. In 15-30 years the system will get replaced and your successor will hear about how great <contractor> did the first time, and they'll get another shot at failure.
[1]: https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/boeing-767-300-n641ua...
The issue here is United penny pinching for decades and now they are stuck with their in house created mess. The right move for them could be to buy one of the smaller upstarts with less issues and then just roll out whatever the small company is using and retire the creaking old mess that just failed them.
Any project to slowly modernize or update that is doomed to fail.
You see the same in the fintech world where small relatively new banks are running circles around their older competitors.
In the energy world, a British company called Octopus is actually licensing their platform (Kraken) to lots of energy companies around the world. One of the interesting things about companies that move to that platform is that they become a much more attractive target for M&A as well; because the job of migrating all the old customers is easier if both companies that are merging use the same, modern platform. That's the hard risky part of any merger. Apparently, in some cases the decision to move to Kraken was motivated as a preparation for this.
I'm mentioning this because that's something that could work in the airline industry. Or United can just zombie on for a few more years and then end up getting absorbed into some other, more successful company.
This stuff must be costing them at all levels in the company. I can't imagine it's very efficient. And the airline industry is pretty cut-throat at this point.
United* was one of the first major airlines to embrace modern tech. Their phone app was lightyears ahead of anyone else (I haven't revisited others in the past couple years, maybe other airlines caught up, I dunno)
When I use to spend way too much time on frequent flyer boards it seemed United was the only one spending money and embracing their tech center to innovate and update old systems, both software and hardware. It takes time to modernize, some changes also have to happen in all the many airports they do business in, not to mention all of the other fragmented systems they were working to better integrate. Since they are not a tech company I don't expect -- or want -- them to "move fast and break things".
Singling them out as penny pinching on tech is simply disingenuous.
*United & the *A group are my preferred airlines; bias is likely as well as a keen interest in what they are doing.
The main difference between software and physical objects like cars is that they degrade with the passage of time (due to wear, corrosion, etc...). If we would magically be able to get a brand new 30-year-old car, it would make absolute sense to use one for a trip where reliability is paramount, as the failure modes of such a car are better understood compared to a brand new design, and can be mitigated.
EDIT: My comment was specific to the 1995 toyota being a far simpler vehicle than current models, hence likely to be easier to fix....but, of course, the flipside is that potentially the older the vehicle, the likely less availability of certain parts.
And if I had enough disposable income to upgrade to something with side airbags, it’d compensate for my lack of trust in others on that drive too! (little tongue in cheek here, just voting for letting some money leave a bank account for reasonably modern safety features—even some ultra-high net worth folks seem not to care at all about those)
Also, how old are the planes?
Let’s hold companies accountable for safety practices, not just the calendar age of their fleets.
Stop trying to put blame on labor.
Except maintenance of software looks more like continuous architectural review and operation of an electrical grid. Calling it maintenance is a little narrow.