I agree, but I've been around this sort of thing and seen the post incident analysis, been in the discussions, etc. Despite the huge costs of these outages, they pale in comparison to the costs of a real HA solution for all "needed to fly" applications.
To give you some idea, ITA Software was bought by Google for $700 million. They were some of the best and brightest minds in this space, on par with any Silicon Valley darling. They successfully wrote a modern replacement for one popular airline function...shopping. They failed, however, at delivering a modern reservation system, despite tons of money and talent invested.
I thought that they successfully delivered a passenger scheduling system, but it failed to gain market traction. I don't know the details, but I'd imagine it would be a huge migration cost even if the new system was much better.
To give you some idea, ITA Software was bought by Google for $700 million. They were some of the best and brightest minds in this space, on par with any Silicon Valley darling. They successfully wrote a modern replacement for one popular airline function...shopping. They failed, however, at delivering a modern reservation system, despite tons of money and talent invested.