Comair: Influence of People, Organization, and Technology Issues

For the nearly 10 years leading up to the system crash in 2004, the company was looking for a way to gain a competitive edge after other airlines had starting using jets that it had itself began using 3 years earlier. The Bombardier CRJ regional jets were first used by Comair and gave them an edge over their competitors, but after other airlines started using them, they had to look elsewhere for a competitive advantage. One of the first areas they looked at was their information system. Their IT system ran different applications for aircraft maintenance, crew scheduling, and passenger booking that were not interrelated and were becoming outdated. By 1997 the IT department talked about replacing the SBS legacy system being used for flight management. The system was 11 years old and written in Fortran. This was a programming language that dated all the way back to the 1950s and no one at the company was an expert in it. It also used their old UNIX operating system instead of HP UNIX.

SBS, who created their legacy system, presented them with new software known as Maestro. A crew supervisor already knew about the product and gave it negative reviews so the company passed on the software. Jim Dublikar, the director or risk management and information technology in 1998, met with SABRE Airline Solutions to come up with a long-term strategy for handling their legacy system and IT infrastructure.