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Millions of Americans will fly this holiday week. Every one of those flights depends on complex computer systems to manage the crew, assign the seats and more. Occasionally those systems fail, and when they do, it can ground an entire airline. NPR’s Joel Rose talked to industry leaders about why these IT meltdowns happen and how their systems can improve.

JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Tony Scott had already boarded his flight from Seattle to Dallas back in July when the crew asked all the passengers to deplane.

TONY SCOTT: So we got off. And I noticed right then that many other flights with the same airline were being canceled.

ROSE: That was around 8 p.m. on a Sunday night. Within a few hours, Alaska Airlines would cancel hundreds of flights, many of them out of its hub at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

SCOTT: It was chaos because the baggage people were clearly overwhelmed. The customer service people were overwhelmed. Every aspect of it was, you know, just a disaster and left people with no information, the wrong information.

ROSE: Scott wound up sleeping on the floor of the airport that night, along with hundreds of other people. Now, Scott is not just a disgruntled traveler. He’s also the former chief information officer at Microsoft and the federal government under President Obama. Scott is now the CEO of a cybersecurity company called Intrusion. And he has some theories about why airline computer systems are prone to major IT meltdowns, like the one he experienced firsthand.

SCOTT: It’s a spider’s web of technology that’s been used to automate everything that they do, all architected at different times from different people. If you were to sit down and do it from scratch, you would never, ever design it the way that it is.

ROSE: Alaska joined the long list of airlines that have been forced to ground their planes because of IT outages in recent years. Each of these incidents is a bit different, from the faulty software update that grounded thousands of Delta Airlines flights last year to the holiday meltdown that brought Southwest Airlines to its knees three years ago. But industry leaders say there are some conclusions we can draw about why these systems fail and what airlines can learn from past disruptions.

EASH SUNDARAM: It’s the backbone of this ecosystem that is extremely fragile.

ROSE: Eash Sundaram is the former chief information officer of JetBlue Airlines, who now works in venture capital. Sundaram says the airline industry is unusual because there is not a lot of commercially available software for much of what they do. So the airlines either have to build their own systems or cobble them together from multiple vendors.

SUNDARAM: The challenge is when one falls apart, it’s cascading pretty quick. All it takes is, like, a hundred flights to be canceled so it can completely shut down the entire network.

ROSE: And once an airline’s network goes down, it’s not easy to get it running again. That’s a lesson Southwest Airlines learned the hard way three years ago when a major winter storm slammed much of the country. While other airlines managed to get their operations up and running again within days, Southwest did not.

LAUREN WOODS: We were highly impacted in a couple key cities that were very crucial to our crew network.

ROSE: Lauren Woods is the chief information officer at Southwest. She had just been named to that job and hadn’t officially started yet in December of 2022. Since then, Wood says the airline has made big investments in its technology, including the system that manages its flight crews.

WOODS: We will see problems much earlier in the process, especially around our crew network, which is why we’ve been able, since then, to weather actually even bigger disruptions. Those capabilities and those investments we made really help us be a much better airline going forward.

ROSE: Southwest is not immune to tech problems, Woods says. But now the airline is able to respond quickly and proactively.

WOODS: We may have a tech outage. But you care less about it if it’s a five-minute recovery and I have many of those, versus I had one major tech outage, and it took me down for a day.

ROSE: IT outages will happen again, in other words. It’s just a question of when. And the test for airlines is how quickly they can get their planes and their customers back in the air.

Joel Rose, NPR News.

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