Comair IT System Problems

In December 2004, a glitch developed in Comair’s flight crew scheduling software known as the SBS Legacy System. This forced the company to down all operations during the busy holiday season. 1,100 flights were cancelled and 30,000 passengers were grounded. During the disaster the company maintained that the winter storm that came to the Ohio Valley was main part of the problem and not their IT system. This storm caused Comair to cancel or delay more than 90 percent of their flights between December 22nd and 24th .The storm though was only part of their problem and not the single cause of it. On Christmas day the SBS legacy system, which was nearly two decades old, crashed. What no one at the company knew was that the reason the system crashed was that it had reached its limit. The system had an antiquated counter that logged schedule changes and by that day, it had logged more than its monthly limit of 32,768 changes. The weather caused so many schedule changes that the system had finally reached its limit and shut down. All the flights for December 25th were wiped out and most of those for the 26th. They had no backup system and their software vendor needed to take one full day to repair the system.

By the time the problem was resolved, the damage had already been done. Delta, which acquired Comair in 2000, lost almost all the profits earned by Comair in the previous quarter. They lost $20 million from the system failure.