airport shutdown

[dep]

quoth Collins Richey:

| Just out of curiosity, what is/was "the airport fiasco." I live under
| a rock and don't watch TV news.

a cincinnati-based delta subsidiary, comair, canceled all 1100 of its 
flights friday night and yesterday due to a problem with a computer 
database which was used to handle crew assignments. because the 
database went flaky (apparently in large measure due to 
cancelations/reschedulings resulting from the big ohio snowstorm 
earlier in the week and to people who had no business doing so trying 
to keep the database current), the airline had no master list of which 
crews were where or even which aircraft were where. as is the case with 
just about every airline problem that arises, this rippled through the 
system. the reasons for this include the fact that often airlines 
contract with other airlines for such things as carrying baggage -- 
your suitcase may be on some other airplane. so there was a mess, even 
beyond the sensible new "security" measures in which little 
five-year-old girls are strip-searched to make sure that they are not 
secretly arab men.

best i can tell, and i've looked, the problem was operating-system 
neutral and involved nothing that would endanger lives beyond those 
endangered when passengers snap after about a day at the airport and 
start ripping out each other's throats. in short, this isn't one we can 
pin on microsoft.
-- 
dep

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists
have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.
				    -- G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"