Airlines are especially stressful, as the problem compounds with time. Once you hit 45 minutes or so of downtime, you start invalidating downstream flight connections. Two hours in, and you've issues with crews not being legal to fly. Four hours in, and there's not enough capacity the following day to fix the missed flights from today, etc.
Sort of. The software is called "automated re-accommodation". But you're solving for several intertwined problems. Which aircraft models / tail numbers fly which flights...they have different seating capacities, nautical range, etc. Which crews are assigned to which aircraft. They aren't all qualified to fly every model. And, they aren't all in the right city, so you have to "deadhead" them there. And, finally, which passengers go on which flights.
They do have solver/optimizer algorithms, but you can imagine it's not a button press thing. There's a lot of human process, trial and error, etc. Oh, and federal laws about crew hours / legality plus union work rules. You can't just assign crews wherever you want for example...you have to consider seniority, their "home base" where they live, etc.
I was in the middle of some major rail cancellations a couple of months back over 2 days - on the 3rd day many of the assets were out of place around the country - they were clearly trying to solve it manually and the impact escalated over the day even though most of the original problems had cleared
it's got to be a great problem to work on - and must be pretty rewarding to watch when you get it right
One vendor of those optimization tools is Jeppesen, which about ten years ago bought up two previously independent companies in the sector, SBS (New York) and Carmen Systems (in Gothenburg, Sweden).
I suspect that there's a lot of eating crow and bargaining with rivals for space on their flights to help clear the backlog, but each incident is going to have unique elements to resolve in it...
If it's only one airline down, you can get away by buying tickets on competitors.
If it's multiple airlines, or the upstream reservation system, or a local meteorological incident, or an airport wide issue, etc... there are no flying plane.
It's standard practice for airlines to fly each others' crews around even during normal operations (often at no cost).
For example, the overbooking that led to the beating on the United flight was the result of an aircrew from another airline being booked on at the last second.
I would imagine that when the shit hits the fan like this, the other airlines are very sympathetic and will do whatever it takes to get BA personnel where they need to go. After all, next month it could be their own systems that are down.
(assuming it's not one of the shared services causing a global outage - not much you can do when everyone is down)
> For example, the overbooking that led to the beating on the United flight was the result of an aircrew from another airline being booked on at the last second.
That's not quite what happened. The flight was operated by Republic Airlines, on behalf of United. Republic bumped the passenger to make way for more of their own crew - it's just that crew was going to to fly a Republic flight operating under another, different, carrier. But both crews were employed by Republic.
