Yeah, at this point I'm almost convinced politicians won't do anything until the system actually collapses. So whenever that happens it'll be a year or two of pain for whoever needs to fly somewhere, as the industry scrambles to rebuild their entire infrastructure from scratch. 😛

Technology is never the problem. Incompetence OR Short-Term optimization is. In this case: Both

at this point front line customer facing departments have joined IT's chorus

The trouble is the IT department generates no income but has big capitals and overheads. Shave some of that and hello promotion! I've been running the IT department at my small company for the past 11 years and the only message I ever get from the CEO is COST COST COST!!!!!

@@chuckygobyebye Interesting, can’t you communicate with the ceo that IT has its benefits and investment returns?

no longer low-cost still low-comfort?

I think it depends on the route. Where I live they are still always 50% of United. But other routes are the same

Agreed, I never understood why they were considered a "low cost carrier." They're never the cheapest, and they never go where I need to get to.

"Low-cost carrier" is a business model description (like network carriers, charter airlines, and others), not necessarily a price observation. Lower turn-around times, uniformity in aircraft types and seating classes, direct instead of hub-and-spoke flights, etc. are all intended to reduce costs, but don't guarantee drastically cheaper prices than other airlines (especially since these days, many non-LCC's are still influenced by some of the LCC philosophy)

I'd say they're Low Cost but not ULTRA Low Cost like say Allegiant/Ryanair etc.

Wait what? You can't get a ticket cause ur names double barreled??

@@Evangelionism Can confirm. Can never figure out whether they want me to leave out the hyphen altogether, replace it with a space... and oddly, this isn't on most airlines' FAQ pages online, despite hyphenated last names not being THAT uncommon.

@@inspiratron That s interesting and pretty ridiculous man. My first name is double barreled (although I usually spell it in a way where I don't include the hyphen, sometimes even for legal purposes) and my family names are double barreled. I haven't had any issue traveling before but buying things online using my bank card can be a bxtch sometimes! Couldn't buy myself Discord nitro using my card cause the hyphenation of my family name made it hard to tell whether to use a space or a dash (neither worked).

Oooooooooh yeah, don't get me started with it lol

Alex accented names too. Like Ólafur, won't work. Either it'll reject, come out as Ólafur, or lafur.

The funny thing is individuals basically do the same. The most up to date tech I have is my Gaming Rig, all so I can play skyrim with mods.

And trying to explain that the cost of an eventual meltdown is going to be way more painful that an organized, preplanned upgrade just goes in one ear, out the other...

@@eldermoose7938 now that you mention it, my graphics card is a 1070 But hey it plays Hogwarts legacy just fine so it can't be too outdated

Me too dude. The Bean counters simply don't understand that the cost to replace obsolete ticking time bombs in the environment is nothing compared to the monstrosity of a headache and of a cost that it will be to try to get a company back up and running if a piece of the critical infrastructure goes kaput. Now you're paying all kinds of emergency fees from consultants and emergency rush jobs from other places to get your hardware faster or whatever the case might be, all while the brass are screaming at you to get it back up and running

@F L Quarter by quarter, short term gains. It’s not sustainable in the long term. That’s the biggest flaw of capitalism.

As some of the of the Airlines work to upgrade their outward facing system the GDS starts to look more like a bunch of json data. I guess it explains why I've heard it called the "database."

TA here and i completely agree its a complete mess , also having worked on the airline side. i understand both and both are a mess

This is crazy to think about. The only reason I re-entered aviation is because of covid. So many commercial airliners need to be stored because flights are still down, which is the reason I even have a job right now (I'm a mechanic at a long-term storage facility)

i heard of the problem of "screen fatigue" from military enthusiast circles its mostly about how long a radar operator could stare into a screen until his eyes feel tired and begin to affect his performance, which is crucial in detecting enemy planes, missiles and stuffs seems like its not really unique to military now

Seems like a perfect work for AI. (not joking, Ive worked some administrative and managment jobs that no one wants to do and everyone would probably highfive if there was an AI to take over, letting us focus on more "humane" tasks)

Yes it's not easy to implement new software.

Yeah... We work on systems running XP but when I worked on IT airline systems that was a whole new level of ancient. OS2 , token ring, and whole airlines running 56k links

Yeah it’s incredibly naive when people say “just upgrade the system!” As if it’s so simple and cheap and can be done in a few hours or something.

Exactly. I work in IT for an airline and your comment is spot on

Sometimes updating to the newest software can cause more issues short term than the old software was. And in areas like engineering, software like cad used to be a pay once and own it forever. Now its exclusively a subscription that costs as much as the original own it forever price so no one swaps out the old software going as far as to setup virtual machines to run it.

And btw the key to solving NP-hard problems is using heuristics. Otherwise, your system will only be good up to an engineered limit and will reliably fail beyond that.

Understand too that Europe's national rail operators often operate different & incompatible ticketing systems, & people desire them to be more standardised & integrated like GDS is for aviation, so as to facilitate international rail travel

I’ve been told that the dutch rails still run in DEC/Compaq/HPe/VSI OpenVMS on virtual alphaservers

not at all

Yeah, I work as a building automation specialist and it's crazy all my clients thar still do that. The only industry that I contracted with that never was like that was pharmaceuticals.

That's some John-Wick-level stuff

Doesn't the entirety of the world's banking system still run on COBOL? Or am I misremembering?

​@@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic563pretty much yeah

Always have stuff in writing, so if someone is looking to blame someone they can't blame you.

Valid comment, but it's "technical debt", not dept. Curiously, I've seen a ton of people get it like dept

I am in technical management, and all I think about is technical debt. Today’s technical debt, is tomorrow’s headache.

It's not a simple case of management not listening. There's no incentive to listen as the video says. You upgrading mostly favours the competition then you. American Govt or international airline organizations could easily fix this by mandating the new solution within a year for all airlines. But they aren't doing it.

It's not just management, it's the accountants too

And that's only because of their complacency. Certainly not owing to any sort of benevolence.

There’s no such command in the GDS

I don't have concrete evidence, but I suspect hotel and car rental companies do this by tracking browser cookies and IP addresses. Sometimes I have secured better rates when using a VPN via another state or country. And don't always believe the "Last room left at this rate" flags.

@@simongchadwick Fun trick for hotel booking. Check your booking price, and if its to high for you, reset your browsers cookies and go back to the webpage. (Do not reload, input the original link again.) On certain booking sites, this is enough to have the algorithm generate a new price.

That's what competition is for -- they can't extort too many passengers or they lose business.

Travelport Galileo > Amadeus 😉

GDS system babyyyyy😅

My mother is the same, she'd destroy me on a command line but can't figure out how to drag a file between folders lol

It really is amazing, even if you figure in that there is a team behind it.

don't forget the passengers exploit ATPCO through usage of VPNs and get a fare for just 310 dollar for a long haul flight from let's say Dallas Fort Worth DFW to Amsterdam, without VPN and booking from the netherlands it's 1200euro's but connect to a VPN in Mexico it's just 400 and with a discount voucher you get insanely low prices, and... say amsterdam can erupt into chaos it get cancelled but not necessarily due to weather but due to a technical fault caused by icing during departure from amsterdam because they didn't de-ice a really frozen Flap pod. then it classifies as a technical problem. flaps problems and one side of te flaps working good the other not can result in a deadly crash. because of 5cm of snow but freezing -20 overnight in march..... so you get to fly on an airfrance flight on an A350 to paris with a free TGV ticket from CDG to Amsterdam, the fuel economy being way better then their A330-200's of KLM you get to that 310mark and choose your seeting for 10euro's extra. and the passenger who has to wait for the airfrance flight to depart 3 hours later, but upon arriving in CDG just hop on a TGV and transfer to a thalys at lille'europe or in brussels On a amsterdam express which will be operated by highspeed trains as well (the ICNG), the eurostar coming FROM london doesn't require lengthy passport checks. a thallys must be reserved and i dont know if they run from CDG directly to amsterdam let's just say a TGV + ICNG is cheapest for the airline. and why not brussels? well brussels airport is more inland and a flight to there would deviate much further actually causing more problem and delays Part of it is a true story... i experienced. especially the crazy price differences and refreshing pages cache's and virtual machines with VPN's to book tickets, amazing. and yeah rerouted 500south f your destination with a highspeed train a thalys from gare du nord would take 2hoursand 40 minutes with more legroom and a awesome 300km/h experience, the only slowdown occurs between brusselsand antwerp were they they do 160km/h but can do 200 with ERMTS enables but not all trains i belgium and the Netherlands have ECTS that is used with incab signalling. from antwerp to amsterdam it's a 300km/h ride again with a stop in rotterdam. and if you live closer to rotterdam than amsterdamm or even closer to antwerp like TErneuzen or near or in breda in antwerp or brussels you take the brussels express and in HSL zuid in the netherlands thers a point were trains can exit high speedline and get to breda very quickly..... it's just amazing parnetership with rail AirfranceKLM SNCF SNCB DB and NS that allows that option as 5CM of snow is not gonna stop a train

Not paying attention would do that, yes.

100% agreed. I worked in consulting with Sabre and Amadeus 20 years ago. The detail in this video is extremely impressive.

@Teamgeist no way to verify without spending just as much effort... and no effective reason to doubt, in my case. The channel seems pretty legit, this does not strongly affect me, so I can just choose to trust here, without much concern.

I'm in IT and a pilot. The cost of upgrading the systems would be horrendous. The amount of FAA and federal red tape and testing would be insane. It would literally have to be all the major Alliances getting together and crowd funding a standard system its that bad. Also, keep in mind Airlines aren't about new technology, they are about stable, and supportable.

@@kimchi2780 I don't think you get the essence of comment above - it's not about new technologies or upgrading everything at once - it's about continuos improvement, which is impossible when managers have mindset of "do not touch if it works". Simple as that. Yes, I can agree that system so safety-critical on which many other system depend has a lot of inertia, but that's only argument against revolution, not against evolution. And last, but not least: the amount of money developers are begging for is magnitude lower than money spend on investments in other branches of this industry.

@@proosee Its just not possible though in the airline space. I mean people easily forget that in the 80's planes were literally falling out of the sky and when Airbus introduced all their wizardry it didn't go off without a hitch. The airline industry has been bit hard by new technology whether it be computers or hardware. They are extremely slow to move on anything and approach more of an it's working perfectly now don't touch it until we need to approach. When you are dealing with lives and money at such a scale their willingness to be up to date is lessened by the fact that they really have no really reason too other than its old and shitty to use.

@@kimchi2780 still: it's not "willingness to be up to date" - literally entire video is about weak spots of this system. I beginning to doubt you ever integrated with legacy system, because if you say "shitty to use" is the most significant problem then you are doing those kind of integrations wrong - you can easily create some intermediate layer to isolate from it and never thing about it again. The case here is that this system is unreliable, slow and faulty - and yes, there are new technologies that solve those problems, but word "new" is not the most important here.

That's why you need to work for companies where technology is how they make their money, instead of where IT/Dev are necessary costs.

Yes! Everyone has bought into the "we can fix all our problems by cutting red tape" mantra that politicians use to pretend their budgets are going to balance because of those magic red tape savings, and everyone seems to have forgotten that this is PRECISELY what regulation is supposed to be for. Making sure that the thing the free market is optimising for is actually the outcome we want, because they will default to whatever happens to be in shareholder interests and sometimes this is in the public interest and sometimes it isn't. It is just much harder to actually do the work, think it through, and implement something rather than just make noises about evil "red tape". (And if we are honest, how many voters are going to recognise that work as being valuable?) If the FAA funded a new fast, modern, extensible system and then denied licenses/permits to every airline that didn't update to support it, airlines would fall over themselves to implement it and not lose the revenue. Problem solved.

Thats not the "good enough" mentality, but the "why not be greedier" one

so f the shareholders and make all industry state owned for the public

@@ibn_klingschor If every worker was staffed in the Army and fleet, we'd have full employment - and nothing to eat

@@the_expidition427 uh how. Armies must be well fed to fight in wars

If they needed to be bailed out then it should be a publicly held company that is sponsored by the government and run by the people, not a corporation, since the government essentially bought it.

@@t.j.vellinga6225 Unfortunately, many of these guys are "too big to fail." Boeing for example, they have been a shit company that ignores safety protocols and all about cutting corners to save cost, yet they keep getting gov contracts to keep themselves afloat. It's because Boeing is one of the largest employers in the US, and if they went belly up, tens of thousands of Americans will lose their jobs. Boeing is holding the American people hostage to force bailouts and contracts from the gov. It's the same thing with many of these big corporations. Their argument is always "If we crashed, we will take down tends of thousands of jobs with us and it will hurt the US economy more than just giving us a few billion dollars to get bailed out."

@@t.j.vellinga6225 Because the government is really good at running things (－‸ლ). Just let them fail.

In the US the airline industry is already subsidized by the government and also has contracts to fly US mail. Any more money given to them will go straight into the airline executives' pockets.

@@ironroad18 Exactly. Remove the execs and socialize the airline industry.

Wow

Damn. 🤦

that would be demoralising. i could never work at a place like that.

US Airways had updated their reservation system and the agents liked it before America West bought them. America West brought Sabre back, and then they stuck with Sabre through the merger with American...yay!

I'm a tech for a company that provides IT support to airports all over the world. Sabre, IMAGE, and whatever the heck Delta Airlines uses are incredibly dated and clunky. They look like an app running in Windows 3.1

I had a new client 6 years ago that had been plagued with constant minor failures and quarterly major failures. After evaluating the entirety of their infrastructure, procedures, and software I recommend a complete overhaul. Everything including the wiring was replaced. New software was deployed, and new procedures were written. It’s been 5 years since everything was completed, I only see them annually now to check in. No issues are ever reported. When you do it right and spend both the time and the money, things just work.

@@Veritas-invenitur great to hear it's doing so well. It gives me hope.

Borrowing at the Bank of Bodge and then paying back with interest.

Are you sure we need to upgrade? This has worked fine for years. What's the ROI? How do we know we really NEED to upgrade? Ha!

This is a wonderful anecdote, and I also think an example of how important Systems Design is of the most critical things when creating long-term solutions. I also have a similar responsibility with a small data team and think about how doing things with effort can have a positive impact not only on the company but also thousands of customers is rewarding and motivating.

I think a better word for the "reverse tragedy of the commons" is capitalism. Why would individual non-cooperation be locally better? Competition is a disease preached to us by the mutually cooperating owner class.

​@@CC3GROUNDZERO Go starve in Venezuela and then tell me how well the alternative works. Oh wait, you wouldn't be able to because even if you survived you aren't allowed to complain.

Don’t bring the E6B into this

Different thing all together. Pilots carry E6B in case of electrical failure, where an analog computer may be all they have to do certain calculations. Technically it’s a flight computer, at least that’s what it’s called, but it’s more like a flight calculator.

@@ducky8075 smart duck

I trust an E6B more than I trust anything else. It's what I learned on. In the event of a total electrical failure you will be returning to your E6B, lap board, and pencil. Total reliability.

As a computer science student, you will eventually learn that "having the latest tech" is not only not achievable, but also dangerous. Robust and failsafe systems are preferred for critical areas, and in case of electrical failure pen and paper are king

What has changed is their profitability.

3 letter airport codes never go away. they are burned in my brain and finger muscle memory. Its hard to type or and not ord.

4 letter codes are better.

@@wta1518 why do you say so? Personally I like 3 letter codes just because I'm so used to it, and they usually have some resemblance to the location of the airport.

@@SKAOG21 So do the 4 letter codes, at least in the US they're typically just the 3 letter code with a K at the beginning (eg. SFO becomes KSFO).

This is my understanding as well, was surprised to hear otherwise in the video.

Yea, I found it weird that the way it was described as being bad is that "behind the pretty UI is a system that joins data from multiple APIs" like yea... that's the entire IT sector right there lol

Iirc Google bought ITA Software, which powered this kind of search for a while and even supported some small airlines, maybe just one Caribbean one. And they got a ton of flack about anti trust from a lot of air travel businesses for basically side stepping the GDS.

@@getellied I was thinking the same thing, but one of the key points was that those APIs haven't really changed in any meaningful way. I'm guessing GDS is mainframe based, which it's pretty hard to find developers for now, and architecturally change would be incredibly risky. Typical enterprise risk avoidance, where they avoid risk so hard that they end up in more risk in the long run.

That was also built by about 1/4 of the people who were at the MIT AI lab in its heyday. (Disclosure/Source: I worked for ITA, but not on QPX.)

And even email is slowly being replaced by Exchange.

@@Yggdrasil42 Isn't Exchange a brand of email server software?

I feel like the only semi interoperable software I have is blender for the single reason it has a bunch of file formats it can save as or load except for whatever the he’ll hbaked is

Usually not even replaced by better protocols, but by worse software with a lot of market share behind it

If you know about raising money, #1 money is infinite #2 only if the problem is big and obvious enough is it worth spending #3 when you do spend, make sure it's super good and novel so it lasts a long time. So it makes sense these are the patterns in airlines.

I have been working in IT for 10 years, and I honestly do not remember what Mainframe means.

Modern mainframes are remarkable pieces of technology. It's a shame they get written off as outdated or legacy or the source of the problem most of the time.

@@dankdank1891 Mainframes are centralized servers, usually built by IBM nowadays (I believe Hitachi also makes modern mainframes but I know little about it). Mainframes are much more powerful than decentralized servers (the servers people usually think of when they say "server") and usually have greater reliability than decentralized servers. Some mainframes configurations have been running for decades without downtime, thanks to redundant systems and sysplex. Linus Tech Tips (surprisingly) has a pretty good video about mainframe hardware

Many of these crew "time out" regulations likely did not exist when the systems were built; so they weren't updated to keep up with changing laws.

@@dankdank1891 A mainframes sole purpose, including having a fully customized z/OS or a very stripped down version of Linux is to process transactions and store the data as quickly as possible. It is all about efficiency. While the hardware has gotten a little better, the software hasn't changed much, why rewrite code that was already optimized to almost the fullest extent decades ago. Not every company needs a mainframe, only those that deal with large volume of concurrent transactions.

Well as long as that oil company was getting fucked I have no problem with that.

Hmm, what box is that? Granted, I don't use the graphical interface (I've been on this GDS for 30 years, don't need it). Are you referring to a command that allows the editing of the 1st level star?

isn’t that the opposite of a limitation? proves that it grants too much rather than too little,

@@gfjfjufidi2880 no its a limitation because of how few people are trusted with systems that don't have sanity checks in place.

I'm wondering how much the giant oil company got discount % from normal fare? I believe they are mostly travel in J

weren't they given an ultimatum by the EU though? Where they have to collectively present a plan on an interoperable booking system, otherwise the EU will make their own and the companies have to use that one. EDIT: granted, that would still mean it is at least a while before it is used.

@@zephyros256 they were given an ultimatum, but I sure haven't heard anything of them even bothering to do anything about it, lol (if anything, some were actually lobbying for the EU to abandon the idea). And if the EU decides to make something of their own, we may well never see it in our lifetimes.

You could have formatted this comment in a non zoomer ticktock algorithm way. "Me typing out an entire comment with context, sentences and punctuation: Im gonna ruin this mans whole carrer!"

@@kepler656 who fukin cares

@@bjoerkengard smaller discount train operators are disrupting rail travel in Europe right now cuz of EU.

That happens to every company after the founder dies.

Human ressources

"...the company no longer treats its employees like people, more like commodities" Welcome to neo-liberalism.

That brings into play the other issue that airlines currently face, being understaffed. If they had more employees, they would be able to put more staff on standby for when issues arise. With current staffing levels, a blip in one place can cause the whole system to breakdown.

​​@@LutraLovegoodprotects company, not people. Hence the name. Manages a resource.

The failure rate of replacing the old airline systems is astronomical. So they have instead focused on building additional functionality outside of the old GDS systems to supplement the old limitations. But it is all very complex and spending money is no guarantee of success.

Yeah, but then you do this for 60 years and no one is now able to even just duck tape the crumbling mess, much less reconstruct it in modern technology (especially since the documentation is lost to time if it even existed in the first place)

I thought to myself: what’s a ☕️ ⏰ ? A watch you wear made of coffee beans? A coffee-themed watch? Oye. I haven’t had my coffee yet clearly!

as a person who watches youtube videos, I watched this video today.

I went to flight school through college and got partially through , then dropped out to work IT haha. Loving working as a field service tech right now. The college program (Eastern Michigan University) was horrible; I was told something like 48/60 of students in my year ended up switching out of the flight science path and got av management degrees or MBAs. We had to take multiple semesters of aviation-oriented classes that were almost entirely useless (stuff like weather science, adjacent to aviation but not applicable in a pilot's career) It's hilarious to me how important the aviation industry is to society in general, yet the barrier to entry is so artificially raised by school institutions and the FAA. College programs are the most approachable way for kids to get into aviation beyond those whose daddies can pay out of pocket for training. We'll continue to have a pilot shortage until young pilots aren't made to jump through a thousand hoops just to get their degree on the academic side *in addition to* flight school It's ridiculous to me that stuff like VORs is something you're still required to spend time and money on and understand, yet they don't even exist anymore really and were mostly obsolete since the late 80s. But I digress lol

As an aircraft mechanic, I knew our it systems were fucked in regards to parts procurement, but never imagined other sectors of aviation to ba also fucked to such an extenr

Then you haven't learned sh*t... if you are a pilot you should have picked up on the fact that this dude doesn't know enough to know that he doesn't have a clue.

You're probably older than the code unless you started coding when you were born.

@@knoahbody69 The only Cobol code I ever wrote was as a part of a course while I was in university. Even then, Cobol was considered to be old, obsolete and strange. No, I did not write any Cobol for any client ever.

Modern versions of cobol are actually not bad to write in. The problem is crust that has built up over 40 or 50 years.

If only AC DC had written a song called COBOLed instead of Snowballed 😉

I work for one of the top 3 banks in Europe and I literally worked on a Java batch application that is older than me just last week. I'm 29.

And also very common

from a software standpoint they are solvable. The real problems are economics and cooperation as was also mentioned here

Manager's response: "solveable? I don't think so, there's not ticket and no budget for that - go working on something useful like new UI design for customers so it will look nice, but be more confusing for the user".

@@proosee Far too clear and far too few buzzwords to be a real quote from a corporate manager. XD

@@proosee of course their is money, it's just a matter of if they want to. All they need to do is have these billion dollar companies all put a bit of money on the side to fund a new or existing industry group to put in the work. Lots of industries have some done similar things. for example the banking industry has SWIFT.

Honestly though, I see this more as a problem in the IT world than non-IT. Upgrading an old vehicle to a newer one is much more straightforward than upgrading to a new software solution. Software never works as intended or as expected and workers find ways around that, but not even good training can overcome the experience with the old system. It's like giving out a new vehicle with the steering reversed. Sure, on paper, just steer the other direction. But of course everyone would crash.

"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." -- Weinberg's 2nd law

I worked in small business as part of an MSP. So many HIPAA violations. No backups. 15 year old virus ridden servers. It was disgusting. Never use your credit card at gas stations, Dentist offices, lawyer offices, even hospitals.

this is hilarious because this is exactly my experience... when your office workspace still uses a more primitive version of a spreadsheet you know whats up and I have no incentive to advise the change so... why bother... -_- infact it got so bad that I want to try ask airlines how the heck they still get parts for such PCs cause finding them is getting rarer in my part of the world in short that yes I want to adapt what airlines use for the house... its THAT BAD tl;dr the office still uses DOS applications to run... and I get laughed at posting comments at LTT if they have answers... well LTT community being LTT community you get the idea

hate to break it to you, but that is common with banks. They don't have IT as part of the base mandatory infrastructure because technically one person with a spreadsheet can run a single bank...just not process more than a few customers per shift ;)

You mean the windows XP that is not supported anymore and is vulnerable to hacking?

IS this ssue w a US problem or worldwide?

@@hassanabdulaziz7275 I’m not entirely sure, honestly.

@@hassanabdulaziz7275 Worldwide. Ask any air crew and they've used a horribly outdated software at least once, probably still does. There's probably only one good EFB software in the market right now and even that is not great

​@@knoahbody69 Hopefully it's on an isolated network where it can only talk to other machines that run Windows XP.

i agree with all of this but especially your last point. between all the different saas/cloud companies that either go out of business, get bought out & slowly scrapped for parts by a larger company, or completely overhaul their product/company focus out of nowhere-- making the decision nowadays to try to upgrade legacy services is a real rock and a hard place. and that's not even to mention the challenges around sourcing new hardware these days (ironically because you'd be competing against those same cloud companies massively scaling their data centres)

Can't companies create a Linux system or they should look at India. There are lot of firms who will make non cloud software that will give ownership to company

The difficulty with the legacy code in Cobol is the lack of tools we became used to in the last decade. Automatic deployment and thorough automatic end to end testing are a hell of a drug. And even more expensive when to be introduced after the fact to a system that is about six decades old and full of tightly interwoven ideosyncracies noone knows fully or may even be in a position to start to understand. Re-implementation is going to be expensive, but for what gain?

@@sorryi6685 yeah, Linux is great for servers, but no company which isn't IT focused and wants to be successful will touch Linux. With Linux, you as a company have to operate and maintain all of it, while you as a company do not have the expertise and not the resources to stay up to date. The same way a production company doesn't run their own haulage subsidiary.

I agree with the first part, but not with the cloud/saas. Does a production company operate their own haulage subsidiary or have inhouse Architects? No? Why not? Bc it's not your business model, so you should only keep the minimum inhouse infrastructure, the rest you try to outsource if possible. The bigger problems are company mentalities, who think that the IT system has to fit all processes, instead of finding a middle ground - pick the software which fits your processes best, and adapt your real world processes as much as possible to the IT landscape. Cloud means you outsource cyber security (only a few companies can afford an actual, decent system inhouse) as much as possible, you don't care about software updates which can stop your production, you minimize the hassle of finding good IT guys (especially if your company is in the country side and a bad IT guy is always worse then none), you need less expensive hardware to run demanding software, lower capital cost and better scaling (classical example, Photoshop - one time licence is ridiculously expensive, a monthly payment plan which flexible in-/decrease is create. Or how big is your server supposed to be? Doesn't matter, take the small one and book additional capacities when needed instead of overscaling your IT hardware landscape) Has cloud downsides and do you need external consultants to support your decision (not making it for you) which one to pick? Obviously. But these negatives dwarf by the alternative - keeping everything inhouse.

Are you by any chance talking about AlteaCM?

@@greecoboost it was not :)

I work at a company selling a GUI rivaling the one from Amadeus and some customers are so happy to switch to ours because it's so much more simple and responsive

@@samconstantinou2335 if you're allowed to just use amadeus you'll be fine haha. Very clunky but once I got used to all the command prompts I was so so fast

It was GoNow?

My dad's best friend when I was a kid was a United pilot and his wife was a flight attendant. I remember them comparing notes because my dad was a truck driver and he bid runs as well. The airline stuff was absolutely crazy. The upside of it was when my dad was gone on the truck and Dale was in town I used to get to go to Stapleton and hang out with him once in a while.

You would not belive how much code that society is depending on is legacy code from 80-s or myb 70-s .. ( similar situation is inside all banks and credit cards ) .. And yes I have huge respect to software developers from that period ..

@@danicic87 Make that 1960s for both banking and the core of the GDS. COBOL for the win, all credit to the amazing developers and the IT staff who chewing gum and rubber band to keep it working

​@@ariandeelsii sorry, you're giving too much credit to these developers and IT. I know quite a few "old timers". IT was very simple back then: call support, which was 99% of the time IBM. 20 years ago I had a teacher who complained that "now you have to do all yourself, in my day IBM was great, they even came without us even calling them, because the mainframe had an error and called IBM by itself". as for developers, we're talking about an extremely conservative industry with rules set in stone for decades. those systems are extremely simple (and because they're simple, they're so reliable). New developers have to work with the latest-and-greatest always pushing what's possible because that's what the market is about. Have to be inventing solutions with unclear and ever changing requirements. a coworker of mine, her dad worked at the bank in the 70s. he did the software in COBOL for the bank. the guy was a construction worker who grabbed a COBOL book one day and showed up at the bank when they were hiring.

@@ariandeelsii yep, that's what we used in 2019 for USAA Federal Savings Bank

@@KingLarbear I've been part of a bank upgrade before, it's criminal the rickety-ass tech our entire economy is based on.

but why are IT systems not designed to be easily upgraded or transferred to new systems. seems to me that should be the main requirement but it's always so complicated and takes great resources.

@ron black The best way I can describe it is to imagine it like changing the gauge of rail track. A larger gauge functions very similarly in concept to a smaller gauge, but you still have to replace the rail itself and the wheels on train cars. Then, there'd be a transition to the new system where a loss of productivity occurs until everything adjusts to the new system. It's pricey in the short-term but not as pricey in the long-term as overloading a smaller system until it fails. Short-term profits in capitalism still prefer to keep the smaller gauge and hope for the best. In IT terms, businesses are using old code/hardware and hoping that it holds instead of transitioning to new systems with more capabilities. Code would need to be optimized for multi-core, hyperthreading capable processors, and parameters would need to be able to accommodate the massive amounts of data an upgrade could provide. Things get complicated quick when you're dealing with trillions of ones and zeroes that need to be processed then sent somewhere else

@@ronblack7870 Well, you can't switch to new systems that don't exist. You need to create those.

TBF a lot of IT professionals do also want to upgrade things that are working fine and not about to explode. We had to pull teeth to get an expensive ($50k) bit of network testing automation equipment, but we could have still done the tests with less automation, it would just be more work for us. The equipment was a big switch that let us set up test scenarios automatically instead of having to hard-wire them.

@@ronblack7870 Designing for upgrades or transferring to new systems is an expense that most businesses are unwilling to pay.

I miss the OAG. If *only* us 'normal customers' could have access to what was in that book back in yesteryear!

Southwest uses Amadeus now and for the past several years at least at the frontline (airports).

All true

"There are other systems too for things like crew scheduling and rolling stock planning, but these often don't talking to each other, so when a major route gets closed for an unplanned period of time due to an infrastructure issue, or emergency, that's why it all falls apart so dramatically, affecting services often far away from the area where the problem is." Indeed. I think the video poster is trying to imply that we should try to replace aviation with public transit trains and that would solve it, but public transit does the same kind of stuff. And it doesn't have the speed that we need in North America and Australia. It can't take 20 hours to go from LA to NYC. Five or six hours is already too long. Good news is that Lockheed and NASA have developed a fuselage shape that lets you break the sound barrier with a barely audible sonic boom, so hopefully we'll get supersonic over land again....so it will be more like 2 or 3 hours to go from LA to NYC. 🙂

You would think companies like IBM could help, since they still make mainframes. But switching to x86/x64, and ethernet, would be ridiculously expensive.

The most widely ignore software design rule is to fail *early* - better a small, localized crash that can be fixed by the developers actually responsible and while they remember all the context, than keeping it limping along with a bunch of squelched warnings and eventually cause a chain reaction of other failures.

@@leftaroundabout so "fail early, gracefully (as in, still return error but don't corrupt anything else), and learn from that error."

And then Borrow at the Bank of Bodge because it needs to be fixed yesterday and the customer is screaming at your clueless manager.

make the system fault-tolerant, not fool-proof

Honestly? It's best to just focus on fault recreation. Never ever try to 'handle' anything that isn't an exception generated by an unreliable system (connection timeouts, retry, etc) Number one priority, record what happened (public entry point) with which parameters, the stack trace and every version number required. Ensure your build process stamps unique version numbers write a new unit test to catch the fault before deployment, patch the code and turn the handle on the release process. Don't have one of those? God help your damned soul, because I wouldn't touch your company with an infinity barge pole.

Military is the same. US ICBM launch control is all in OS360 assembler.

@@amcluesent That is kind of the point nowadays though... Low sophistication means low susceptibility to cyber warfare, which is what you need with ICBMs. As long as they guarantee a counter launch before the enemy nukes hit the silos, that is good enough.

Same with insurance industry...

@@Spectification I've heard this a lot and while I think it has merit I feel like it's more an accidental benefit then a planed strategy.

@@eldermoose7938 For sure its not a planned benefit. Its just a the biggest argument why not to upgrade.

Yes!!! Good on you.

True, but there's still no reason why you couldn't invest in improving the system - making the process of getting an re-booking more flexible, scheduling including crew information, making it harder to do a mistake - or make the mistake less hard to fix afterwards. From my experience I want to echo what many here are saying: IT might be expensive, but the one of the things even more expensive is to wait until it crashes and everything burns. How much did SW have to pay for their Christmas chaos? You can probably save up to 90% of that by improving your system before it crashes in the worst possible situation. Down time is bad, but down time during Christmas is worse. But as the IT guy, you don't get to hire the people needed to fix the system, you're just there to keep it running, day after day, while yourself most clearly seeing these things will - one day - crash and burn an you're like Cassandra forced to have no one believe you, or no one care.

Very much this, it's really important to get it right.

A lot of the improvement comes in training new employees. Text systems are deceptively fast for experienced employees, but painfully slow to adapt for the new.

@@Steven_Olson that's why TUIs (text user interfaces), which are a hybrid of CLI and graphical, are amazing. Powerusers can rip through using hotkeys while noobs can point and click their way through menus.

how is it not in the shareholder's interest for airlines to use overstretched outdated software that can risk losing billions in revenue if the system breaks down

Damn shareholders.

​@@DrBluefoxupdating cost money. Money that the shareholders dont get.

the summary of a much hated philosopher is that his entire theory can be summarized as "Abolition of private property". he was correct to say that it all boils down to the question of private ownership versus the public good more than a hundred years ago and you are still correct today.

Nah they barely even listen to their own shareholders these days, just look at Disney at all their angry shareholders because they aren't being heard. It's the board of directors in all of these companies that are the problem, they are incompetent.

We have those as well when I was with KLM. Whenever I use that validating machine to issue an MCO, the passengers ar the counter are always startled with the loud smashing sound it makes. 😂

@@kingthranduil8807 That's hysterical.

What is a validation plate?

@@vishalsyoutube A validation plate is a metal embossed plate with the airline name and logo along with their three-digit IATA issued accounting code. This allowed you to validate an airline ticket on that airline or one in which they had an interline agreement with.

@@rustydogcfl thanks!

Actually, Southwest *does* fly out of O'Hare now. They added it back in February 2021. However, it still flies a lot fewer flights to and from O'Hare than it does to and from Midway.

Southwest flies out of O'Hare now too. I know because the last time I flew there were only about 20 million advertisements for it.

Actually just flew in last Monday. Southwest was present.

Apparently, that's wrong, so Wendover isn't so great and reputable.

Not really

no, the #1 asset of an airline is its frequent flyer program

No, it's proximity to where people live and low costs. Ryanair is a universally hated - not disliked, no, outright hated - airline despite its 100% safety record, in over 25 years of operation they never had a single lethal accident. KLM, which was involved in the Tenerife disaster, the most horriffic air crash in history, is a lot better liked. The reason people fly Ryanair instead of KLM is that you can fly from easy to reach local airports. Within an hour of travel by car, 3 Ryanair bases are located from where I live: Eindhoven, Düsseldorf, and Weeze. The closest international operations base of KLM is Schiphol, which is twice as far away. My experiences with KLM are rare but were very positive. I still fly with these cunts from Ryanair because Eindhoven is just too close and too easy to travel to (even by train and bus it's just an hour away from here) to justify travelling twice as far and paying a slightly (or significantly) higher fare just to avoid them.

IBM, Goggle, Facebook, PayPal, airlines, manufacturing, railroads, trucking... list goes on and on. It's like the old saw of running from a bear... I don't have to be the best in the industry. I just need to be marginally better than you in some manner.

To be fair to airlines, they are alot more regulated, and most of their stuff has to first get approved by the FAA before they can use it, and that's expensive and slow.

So true

Cryptic ftw, until you have to automate it.

🤨

“Command line” is missing the point - CLIs can actually be very efficient (as also the video remarks). The main problem is the backends behind them. ...And the lack of education so younger employees can't use the proper interface and need to use the graphical layer which can't actually make use of all the functionality.

I hope you got her name & sent her something. :)

Blame the Common Use workstation standard ... which still says pointing devices are optional.

Yes, finally, I work at a travel agency that's specializes in the marine sector, I honestly from the bottom of my heart to the depths of my soul HATE THE FRONTENDS give me my cryptic line and I will book you in 30 seconds to wherever you want, sure, for the newcomers the cryptic entries are a pain to learn BUT once you master them you cannot in good conscience use the frontends. Let's say that I use sprk to book from ATH to FRA, it LITERALLY takes me 2 minutes to create the reservation, on Sabre I need no more than 30 to 40 seconds plus I have all my quick keys programmed... NDC is just a fancy way of jamming more ancillary services to the pnrs it does nothing to help with the reservations... Actually it's even slower since for each reservation the GDS must download all the information that it's not needed...

Agreed, when you get used to command line interfaces and know how to get the best out of them, it's super fast

@@nicknellas1287 One of the main problems with modern software development is that non-technical people (who are often in charge of the software development) have trouble understanding anything that's not a graphical UI. I imagine that this explains a lot of the useless new frontends: they are easy to sell because the CEO can touch and feel them, even though they don't fix any underlying problem with the ancient backend systems.

Worked retail in 2000. Had green screen look up for inventory, price, wholesale price, reorder etc, way more than a sales clerk would need. I only knew a couple commands, but it was damn useful and fast. If it said it had it, we had it. Then they replaced it with heavily locked down Windows running on comically underpowered hardware, as in typing would lag behind significantly. Everything took forever and told you nothing. Insult to injury the colour bit depth was set to 8 causing eye bleeding dithering that, if switched to 24bit manually via some workarounds, ran at least 10 times faster making it useable and looked as it should.

Fun fact, Linux is the de facto OS for Supercomputers and Financial trading servers so the OS is not the limiting factor for why Delta's entertainment system had to reboot on your flight. Delta could easily make their entertainment system more robust so that it could handle software failures and hardware malfunctions while providing 100% uptime availability. But they will never do that as it's an order of magnitude more expensive to do so and they have no financial or PR incentives to spend that kind of money.

Yes, considering that Pan Am shut down in 1991.

These systems were developed in the 60’s so they’re now 60+ years old. Unfortunately the ‘new’ NDC (XML) interfaces need to be backwards compatible so while interfaces may have changed, the underlying logic/limitations have not.

B-b-b-but, and hear me out here... Money n o w /s Absolutely agree, absolutely hate the way corporations work these days

Not here and now? What, you think HIGH FREQUENCY TRADING is a joke or something?? 🔫🤡 🔫🤡 🔫🤡 🔫🤡 🔫🤡

@@TheDoomerBlox 60 fps 46 khz trading

@@heartache5742 The remaining 2 Khz were lost in the bufferbloat, unfortunate reality.

it's about the ceo execs and boardmembers not stockholders. If a ceo comes onboard a profitable well run company..cuts salaries and benefits, slashes the maintenance and puts its departments on starvation budgets profit jumps short term as the company feeds off itself. 5 years later his reighn has been very profittable, he the board and the execs have recieved massive bonuses..he leaves and the next ceo takes charge of a broken down barely functional organism in it's death throws and the profit and stock prices start to reflect that

I would much rather enter AD15OCTAMSCDG and have instant response with accurate availability than fill in endless boxes on a slow fiddly online form and wait for pages to load and see half the picture .... Just speaking as a Amadeus native user dealing with corporate travellers... I guarantee that making bookings, changing bookings, re-issues etc take a fraction of the time compared to NDC where , when forced to use , we grind to a halt. But yes, I've had my laughs with KLM call centres ... "married segments" HAHAHA

Only lasted 8 months on that posting. Typing out entries can be confusing at times but when you got to talk to a passenger on the line it gets more confusing. _I'd rather work on the ramp servicing aircraft than go back to Airline call centers again._

As someone who, on the daily, works with Amadeus reservations and Altea CM, it baffled me how easy things became after a while. At first it seemed like everything had its own entry and to some extent it’s true, everything ticket agents do has a backbone to the basics of creating a PNR.

It's not difficult, you're just not suited to it. Hundreds of thousands of travel professionals use it every day. It's fast, it's accurate and it's extremely powerful. Airlines have been trying to build GUIs and alternative systems to replace Native for over two decades now, and nothing comes even close to replacing it.

Read of a similar phenomenon for cashless payments, where Android smartphones sold by Verizon had GPay blocked as Verizon was launching a competing app. In my country meanwhile there're almost 30 different cashless payment systems, including some that are variants coming from the same company e.g. NETS (a debit card, whose name stands for "Network of Electronic TransferS") vs NETS FlashPay (a stored-value card that can be used to pay public transport fares too, but happily, NETS terminals @ merchants accept FlashPay too) vs NETS Pay (which is app-based instead)

Air travel is practically dehumanizing at this point. I live 900 miles from my mother and we’d rather do two days of driving to visit her than a two hour flight.

@@abbysc417 This is why the US needs a high-speed rail network, it would free up the airports of all the small local planes that need to connect town that already have a rail connection.

@@rafski123 the us needs a Shinkansen bullet train system like japan

@@HalbeargameZ Shinkansen could be an option. Siemens' ICE trains have also proven reliable in many countries (Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Russia, China, to name a few). Also, there is the Alstom TGV, which is comfortable and good for high capacity with its double deck options.

One of the problems is that the current market actively rewards the airline that can get you from point a to b with the lowest initial ticket price. Stuff that was included in the ticket like seat reservation, luggage, carry-on etc, is now an upcharge because it looks more attractive on booking sites to have a low initial price rather than a fare where everything is bundled in. One of the reasons why everything else gets cut or worse in quality.