From the NY Times:
American Airlines Error Leaves Thousands of Holiday Flights Without Pilots
www.nytimes.com/…
The flights that currently have no scheduled pilots originate from cities including Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Washington; Dallas-Fort Worth; New York; Miami; Chicago; and Philadelphia, Mr. Overman said.
It was not immediately known how the scheduling error happened. The airline assigns flights to pilots, but pilots can use the internal system to drop or trade flight assignments. Normally, the pilots wouldn’t be able to drop flights unless someone can cover them, but the error allowed any drop requests to go through, and “an extraordinarily large number of pilots” planned around it, Mr. Overman said.
Some new computer program or update must have allowed this to happen. The bug must be new, otherwise the problem would have come up long ago.
I’ve been surprised before by the way big companies seem to have Information Technology “talent” that makes big mistakes, but this takes the cake. You’d think that when there’s a set of programs that seem to be working OK, if you want to tweak or change something you should set it up to run on a parallel set of computers and let it work with the same real data that the existing, functioning program is using. Then make sure the results from the old and the tentative new program are the same, or that if the new one program puts out different results ALL the differences are improvements and nothing gets broken. Yet a huge, highly computer-dependent company manages to make an error like this.
To err is human, but to f*** things up royally, you need a computer.