Originally Posted by
HSLD
No discussion of technology at UAL would be complete without mentioning UNIMATIC the companies 50+ year old core computer system. Ive seen the CAL flight planning products in NRT and IMO are light years ahead of of UAs new Flywize product.
Also worth mentioning are the legions of IT outsourcing liaisons at HQ in Chicago. UAs IT department doesn't produce much, if anything. Its core job is to write the spec and QA code that's outsourced to India (tiger team). UA IT has built it's own empire by becoming a revenue source for the company, however by some twisted accounting scheme, the revenue source is other corporate divisions (ie flight ops). On the upside, the line for hamburgers in the HQ cafeteria is alway short.
Funny how we perceive our own. How many use hours, how many rebuilds do some of the airline's ramp equipment seemed to have lived through? I think the same is generally true of the industry's technology infrastructures as well. I watched with envy as AMR installed gate readers for boarding in the early 1990's while Crandle gloated and yet years later we were still dealing with seat duplication delays.
Many of us couldn't tell someone the difference between Unix and Linux, but we all know out dated when we are subjected to it as end users. Ancient green screen CRTs, running text string commands and no home access to schedule or bid information, long after the rest of the industry had converted to GUI systems. They never upgraded until late, partly due to the relationship with EDS, but also because the managerial teams prior to Bethune, were less than willing to spend any money that didn't go into their own golden parachutes. Both the current schedule access system and the PBS process are antiquated and sadly in need of some reprogramming to make links that are more realistic to the data access required by crews. Many of the promises to make PBS better, such as off line access, have long since been broken. Yet the system is alive and does see improvements, most recently a bid analysis tool. None the less, union infighting and the excuse that the merger is taking precedence, seems to be a catch all excuse for continuing failures.
On the training end of the spectrum, if you want home access for recurrent training relief, you'd better have a windows system at home that runs I.E. 6.x or earlier. Most of the modules won't run on more updated systems funning later versions of I.E.
On the upsides? FOQUA or is it FOQwah? ATC liaison and telemetry. The embrace of the B-777 in the heyday of cash flow, brought some great tech use and support people to the airline. Data link, telemetry and AIM (airline amendable module) portions of the FMCs were deeply configured and well utilized due to the diligence of a few key people, many of whom have sadly since retired, or lost political traction and slid off the edge into the dismal abyss of line flying.