I was affected. Taking off now for a 5:30pm PT flight to Seattle. Aside from clearly not having an appropriate disaster readiness plan, communication was bad even though some information was readily available. For example, there was an inbound ground stop for KSEA for hours, but it was never announced to passengers. We were very lucky the crew was fresh, and there was no discussion of when they would time out. I happened to find out that the crew had lots of time left so I decided to stay but at least a dozen people gave up and left.
Air travel sucks. I wasted 8 hours today and I won’t even get a lousy T shirt. I’m sure next time I can take my business to a different airline who will also be happy to not do any better.
For flights departing or arriving in the EU you get fairly nice compensation for significant delays (3+ hours) between 250 EUR (<1500km) and 600 EUR (>=1500km). Helps ensure incentives align beyond reputation.
I literally had to sprint across LIS airport (past the tax-free refund counter I had business at) to make an alternate flight, after waiting in line for 3 hours.
If I didn't run, I would have missed the alternate, and Airfrance would have owed me like 700EUR plus an overnight stay with meals. I did them a favor. I requested reimbursement for my missed tax refund (which was <100EUR); some guy in India told me they weren't legally obligated to reimburse me, and closed the ticket.
Unless they claim, by noreply email, that it (eg. ATC strike in a 3rd country for which they had 2 weeks' notice) was out of their control and so no compensation is owed.
Then you get the pleasure of a phone tree that only allows the option of giving feedback about the noise on the plane or the cleanliness.
Then once you get through and manage to plead your case you'll get quarterly emails about how your case is in review and sorry about the delay but you should have news next week.
Yea, they tend to deflect. Then you send email quoting laws and inform them that next email will be trough lawyers, and they pay out quick (personal experience)
In recent case I quoted the actual law & caselaw and the response I got was that I need to contact the marketing carrier and they will stop responding now. Funnily enough, the carrier I was in contact with was the marketing carrier (as background, codeshare flight was cancelled almost month earlier but I was never informed & I only discovered it when I went to airport).
NEB in Finland is Traficom, but they don't handle individual complaints. Those handled by Consumer Advisory Services and European Consumer Center & these are residence based as far as I understand (I'm Finnish citizen but I don't live in EU).
The only alternative to court is Consumer Disputes Board but their resolutions are just recommendations & Finnair has a long history of ignoring them so spending 2-3 years there seems like waste of time.
Although a pain, I've had great success by simply asking for "some form of compensation" for my delay. They're not going to offer you cash back, but you can then push them to give future flight credit. I've gotten $30-$150 on average depending on the value of the ticket purchased
The law is clear though, if the airline doesn't comply, raise a complaint with the regulatory body of the country they are located. Suddenly they become very friendly (been there, done that, got all the monies)
Often only if you are prepared to go as far as CEDR/MCOL.
European airlines are not forthcoming with that compensation /at all/. They have entire teams, procedures, policies, strategies etc to avoid paying out
I will say I expected Ryanair to be more awkward about it but apart from a few discouraging messages on the claim form (“are you sure you’re entitled to compensation?” and “most claims aren’t successful” type stuff), once I did fill out the form they paid out quickly and without fuss, despite the payout being larger than the original fare
Fair enough. It's mostly the 'bigger' long-haul airlines I've seen complaints about. But I can also find anecdata about Ryanair too without much effort:
Happened to me with Alitalia once, they changed their stance immediately when I put the local office of civil aviation on Cc: and the money was soon in my bank account.
This is the trick. The CC'd address doesn't even have to be correct, just make sure the host/domain part is the correct official local authority, and they'll do your right really quickly.
How far have you taken it? Letter-before-action mentioning CEDR/MCOL? (The stage at which European airlines begin to consider stopping their blanket "no" response)
Switzerland might have options for small claims court claims online too
Have you filed a complaint with the swiss air regulatory authority?
I did that when Icelandair didn't comply within the allowed timeframe and suddenly they were much more forthcoming.
In Australia I think there is such a rule, so when they approach the deadline, short of an option: they just cancel the flight. It doesn't count as a delay, and won't affect their statistics of delays!
Some other airlines "swap planes" and do swapsies with every passengers, on every flights, if they get a morning delay; they trickle it down all day long. It's ridiculous seeing lines of people moving to another gate, all day. When your plane arrive at your gate, you know you're being moved to another line and the delayed passengers will get your plane. So that way, delays stay within the bounds!
I'm not sure why the swapsies plan is unreasonable?
I show up for a flight to Mordor scheduled departure at 8 am, you for a scheduled departure at 9:30 am.
The plane scheduled for the 8 am departure is unavailable (for whatever reason) and there's a plane that can board for a 9:30 departure... Shouldn't I get preference since my flight was scheduled to leave earlier? When the other plane becomes available or is replaced, your flight will go out on that (or whatever flight in the swapsies chain).
What alternative would you prefer:
a) Early flight has to wait, maximal delay for those passengers trading off with minimal delay for others
b) Something based on class of booking + airline status + time of booking, like they use for upgrades. Frequent fliers get minimal delay, ultra economy gets maximum delay
c) prefer passengers with connections that haven't yet been missed, otherwise a or b? Maybe just prefer passengers where makable connections avoid an overnight missed connection. This one makes systemic sense, but may not be easy to compute.
That policy and a long delay I had going from Iceland to London made the whole airfare for the trip (canada to london and back) free.
I think I even made money.
However, you have to be insistent, I first filed a complaint with the airline, and when they didn't comply in the given amount of time, I filed a complaint with their regulatory authority, and then suddenly the airline remembered me and gave me the money.
Equivalent protections have been dismantled by the Trump admin in the US.
I believe the argument is that regulation encumbers airlines and, instead, the free market will incentivise participants to handle outages and delayed flights in a competitive way.
Travel insurance is -EV. For the average person who uses it, they will spend more than they recoup. Otherwise the insuring company holding their policy would, you know, not be in business. I don't think there's very much skill in opting in to a -EV bet. The purpose of insurance is to avoid catastrophic losses, which is not a factor in this anecdote.
Your mental faculties are not very well developed, it seems. Card counting is a skill. You gain an edge by being good at a simple game. You have direct influence over the outcome. Ditto the usage of credit cards.
It is in no way comparable to insurance. Your only influence over the outcome is to commit fraud (which is in itself a massively -life EV proposition). You are at an unbelievable information disadvantage, because the insurance companies are the ones holding all of the cards and have counted them thoroughly.
You have not actually posited a way to gain an advantage in taking traveler's insurance. If it were a skill issue, you would have elaborated on the skills required to do so. Instead you simply suggested that having traveler's insurance at all is a skill issue, and when called out, deflected to completely irrelevant topics.
Air travel sucks. [..] I’m sure next time I can take my business to a different airline who will also be happy to not do any better.
Yes, this is what you get when people don't organize themselves politically. You get a fucking nightmare to live in.
I think politically, everyone would want airlines to have working IT-systems and they would probably want to pay $100 (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay for that, but apparently humanity is just too stupid to make it work. (I am not the problem in this, because I try to be politically active when I have time, but humanity is just so fucking stupid that it's not even funny; I guess someone should invent an anti-lead; something to put in the water supply to add 30 IQ points, but that would probably be punishable by death, because no good deed goes unpunished in this hell scape.)
> I think politically, everyone would want airlines to have working IT-systems and they would probably want to pay $100 (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay for that, but apparently humanity is just too stupid to make it work.
Not stupid, just corrupt :)
If we did this, the money would get misappropriated or stolen - most likely completely legally through overpaid consulting fees.
So clearly we should pay someone to prevent that from happening.
You can't really add a bunch of fluorine ions to water because they'd all be negatively charged. We say we're adding "fluoride", but really we're adding ionic compounds that include fluoride.
This seems analogous to the difference between chlorinated water (toxic) and salt water (not at all toxic). It's always interesting to me that adding chlorine to water makes it poisonous, and adding sodium causes it to explode, but adding sodium chloride does... nothing in particular.
i have applied and interviewed at AlaskaAir in order to help my "hometown" airline + get free travel. its not shocking to state they are a very ancient infrastructure that is being run and protected by fiefdoms that refuse to even acknowledge best practices of any infrastructure tech released in the past decade. as a former business traveler of AlaskaAir, i stopped flying on them after the 6th flight in a row that was either delayed hours, or never showed up, with no humans at the gate to even provide updates. one of those flights was because Alaska Air had not trained their ground crews how to de-ice the plane and refused to use the deice-as-a-service, stubbornly keeping it in-house, which had their entire Alaska flight grounded at KSEA for an entire day for a light dusting of snow. the AlaskaAir app would consistently route me to the wrong gate, for a flight that was still two hours away, shouting notifications that boarding was closing. i used FlightAware and ignored the AlaskaAir app as it is completely worthless. now with their merger with Hawaiian Air the plan (from an insider) is to ignore all of Hawaiians modern-ish infra and just slam everything into Alaskas ancient tech stack. and if you are still not convinced, research how long Alaska Air was running without a Chief Safety Officer, before and after, Flight 261, and thought it was fine. a true disaster of an airline from the infrastructure culture to the safety culture. i now keep applying just to get on a call with anyone infra related to shout at them for ruining that hometown airline.
> its not shocking to state they are a very ancient infrastructure that is being run and protected by fiefdoms that refuse to even acknowledge best practices of any infrastructure tech released in the past decade
I struggle with the notion that a high quality airline operating system cannot be developed using technologies as of 2015. Most of what we are drowning in right now is the product of the last 10 years.
The last place we need fancy new shit is in air travel. This is precisely the kind of thing where you do want to call someone like IBM to install a mainframe. Failure of an airline's IT systems can begin to approach the kind of impact you get with a payment network outage.
Hell, you could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 60's. You could run a high quality airline on the tech of the 30's nothing except radios and the planes.
It's not a tech problem, it's a culture problem. Just because the infrastructure is old does not mean that it is bad. The main deciding factor is how well it is maintained. But that is to hard for many people. So much easier to say "It'S bAd bEcAuSe iT is oLd" and walk away.
Most are - irony of irony is that when Delta had its big outage due to CrowdStrike, dealtamatic/deltaterm was still running just fine, but no one could get into it because all of their windows machines were locked out.
At the core of most airlines is a customized version of IBM TPF, its very reliable and highly available, its all of the other stuff that breaks down.
We will in time find out what grounded AS, I wouldnt be surprised if its some sort of middleware connecting their iPads to the CRS they use for ticketing operations, but it could also be something as simple as their weight and balance application going offline.
AS is a fairly well run airline (as are DL, AA and UA) with a heterogeneous mix of systems in service, ideally this heterogeneous nature should make for a more resilient system but it also can lead to single points of failure when you have to glue too many different systems together.
excellent point. at tmobile (circa 2014) it required 87 APIs be hit to turn on a new subscriber. if the 34th API failed, the subscriber had to wait and start over clogging up the stores. at the core only 3 or 4 of those APIs were crucial to start the service and the rest could have been fine with eventual consistency. who is ticketed for what flight is the core, the rest dealing with plane can be handled manually just like the small airplanes do it, manual weight & balance, flight planning, etc. but Alaska chooses not to do that and is ok losing millions of dollars per day disrupted while losing customers because they do not care. and not hiring a safety officer for years proves they do not care.
I am by no means an industry insider, but I’m skeptical of your claims about running a ln airline on tech from those eras. The visible side of airline IT (ticketing) perhaps, but surely there is a lot of behind the scenes software that facilitates the efficiency of operation (plane positioning, route planning, maintenance tracking) required to compete on price in the modern era.
It’s easy to complain about modern airlines (and I do), but it’s still true that’s never been cheaper to fly, and IT infrastructure is surely no small part of that.
I think the ticketing systems are probably the most modern parts of airlines. As far as I know, the tech that actually runs the plane does not change very often as it needs to go through approval processes.
that was my point in the purposeful use of the word "fiefdom" to describe the Alaska IT culture. it wasn't focused on optimal infra state with what it had, it was focused on following the cult of the winders wizards that refused to acknowledge anything different like Linux.
The US has a severe brain drain issue in the tech industry. American companies don't pay good salaries for people who specialize in well tested technologies, like the ones you mention from 2015. These same companies prefer to throw tons of money at shiny new things, like blockchain, AI, or whatever the next buzzword will be. Engineers in stablished tech areas will either have to move with the crowd or retire, and never be replaced. New engineers will by necessity have to learn the new shining tech. So the answer is that, yes, we could do these things with 2015 tech, but we cannot because they won't pay experienced people to do this.
one of those flights was because Alaska Air had not trained their ground crews how to de-ice the plane and refused to use the deice-as-a-service, stubbornly keeping it in-house, which had their entire Alaska flight grounded at KSEA for an entire day for a light dusting of snow.
Oh, was that the reason we were stuck in Orlando, and the only airline that couldn’t fly out of SeaTac due to snow that day was the one with “Alaska” in its name? (Yes, literally every other airline at SeaTac that day was flying, if a bit delayed.)
yep! at least it was entertaining watching the ground crews standing around doing nothing while the updates broadcasting into the lounge were making it sound like the apocalypse, with Delta, United, SWA, well basically everyone else taking off....btw the Alaska lounge is like paying $500 a year to eat at a Holiday Inn buffet, no the HI buffet is better.
Oof, Alaska 261 [1]. We say Boeing is bad now, but McDonnell-Douglas had a 30-year run of releasing model after model with catastrophic and foreseeable engineering defects. (Not to say that Alaska was not also extremely culpable in that incident too). In that light, the MCAS and door plug fiascos might just be Boeing trying to live up to the rich traditions they inherited from MD.
to make their infra culture even more dire, they require in-office 5 days a week, and moved their office to SeaTac airport. KSEA is a solid 90 min commute each way from the tech hubs of Kirkland and Seattle. not to mention SeaTac the city is a crime ridden dystopia where 3-4 cars are stolen per day from SeaTac airport and the local officials response is "ya but its a lower stolen car average than the city of Seattle".
i prefer to arrive to work fresh and not have smoked meth or fentanyl the entire train ride not to mention dodging random stabbings, homeless feces, and insane people that belong in a mental care facility.
Not the main topic, but as I was in the network tab, I noticed that the page is ~3.3MB compressed, 2.4MB of which is the "Alaska Hawaiian" svg logo here:
I was curious why and the answer is stupider than you'd think:
The circle in the image is an embedded PNG which has not been pngcrushed at all.
Instead of building a few gradients out, it looks like whoever did the export to svg out of Illustrator or whatever let it export this horrendously large circle. With a gradient. That costs 2.5MB.
Maybe it's an easy way to speed up the page load if the boss ever asks them to. You have to carve out a few CYA options when working for a hostile manager.
I was affected as well. My IAH->SEA 7:10 PM Central flight took off 4 hours late. It’s 4 AM central and we’re just descending to land in Seattle. Communication from the airline was basically nonexistent and the poor ground crews didn’t get any information either. I thought we wouldn’t even take off because of crew time limits, but we were lucky to have a fresh one.
The system apparently came back and died several times before we could take off. We pushed away from the gate because the system was working and then had to wait on the tarmac for an hour because the system was down again.
Not a fun day for air travelers.
A lack of effective resiliency and redundancy at all of the major US airlines makes air travel feel like a bit of a coin toss in terms of whether you can expect to get where you need to go on any given day. In the past 3 years each of the big 5 have had multiple full ground stops due to multi-hour/multi-day system failures. They get heavy coverage during and in the immediate wake but consumers and the market tend to forget relatively quickly. As such there just isn't enough consumer or regulatory pressure on these airlines to invest the actual resources required to build more effective fault tolerance into their operations. I'm afraid this is just going to be part of life in US air travel for the foreseeable future.
A small excerpt of the memorable ones or where I was personally affected, but there have been many more over the period:
Holiday 2022 Southwest system collapse
July 2024 Delta 5 day outage
August 2025 United weight and balance outage
June 2025 American outage
October 2025 AWS outage impacting AS, AA, UA, DL
What amazes me is watching Delta specifically on several occasions their crew management system seems to be a huge weakness. Once it goes down it seems to heavily rely on crews calling in to note where they are and other status details.
It's like once it goes down all state is lost and for a long time, often days, crews describe having to call in and wait while they figure it out who does what / goes where.
I don't like to oversimplify, but it really seems like a solvable problem ...
Interesting idea, but their PR piece mentions a "failure at a primary data center" which at face value does not sound like a cert issue, and CT logs for *.alaskaair.com show lots of certs issued every single day, but nothing that seems mission critical around October 23 or 24.
this is a cute meme, but for the past 10 years, SSL configurations have been at the root of problems for what seems like the majority of cases of unexpected, sudden, service interruptions. YMMV.
Has anyone else noticed their website has been having a ton of issues in the last few weeks as well? In terms of bookings failing and trips not appearing? Just my anecdote but software issues seem to have become very frequent over there…
Is there a public generic measure of IT outages with historical data. Severe outages seem to be more common lately, but I don't have any data to back it up.
"As a result of the IT outage, if you are an affected passenger, we are:
- providing hotel accommodations;
- arranging for ground transportation;
- providing meal vouchers; and
- arranging for air transportation on another air carrier or foreign air carrier to the passenger’s destination; as appropriate, based on your circumstances."
That's not what's written on the webpage. If your post is meant as a critique that they’re not offering those services, you should make that clear to avoid spreading misinformation.
Ah, okay. I did a Google search for that phrase before posting my comment, but couldn't find any result. Probably its not indexed yet. Thanks for the clarification.
Still I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion.
The confusion from people who declined to read the webpage?
Most people will read both the comment and webpage, or neither. In either case there's no problem.
It's only your uncommon case of reading the comment, not reading the webpage, and yet still feeling confident in making assertions about the webpage contents, where there's an issue. But that's not common, and I daresay the issue is not on OP's end.
And conveniently, Hacker News supports hyperlinks, so you can easily provide a source for your quotes so that everyone reading your post don't need to search for it again.
(1) abnercoimbre (a) read through the document, (b) extracted the part of it that affected passengers are most likely to be interested in, and (c) helpfully provided a summary of that part;
(2) jabiko (a) didn't bother reading the document, (b) assumed abnercoimbre was lying about what it said, and (c) accused abnercoimbre of "spreading misinformation";
(3) The underlying problem here is that abnercoimbre's behavior was bad, whereas jabiko provided a reasonable response to seeing an entirely truthful summary that consisted only of a direct, unaltered quote from the primary source.
That's an interesting perspective. I might lean another way.
You will notice that the provided quote is not from the submitted page[1] but from another page[2] on the same site. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on this page that assumes that quotes on top level comments are sourced from the submitted page unless otherwise noted.
Mind you, I'm not defending jabiko here – I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable.
> I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable.
But you're wrong about that. Would you consider a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book to be a couple hundred documents, or just one?
The text abnercoimbre quoted was explicitly referenced on the page as being the airline's policy toward affected "guests". Anyone looking for that information would have found it, because... it's included in the document. It's not like the quote was pulled from the "investor relations" page after abnercoimbre clicked a link in the generic site-wide topbar for no reason.
Try a different angle: suppose that link to the travel policy went to an outdated page that Alaska Airlines disavowed. The old page, for whatever reason, specifies a set of benefits that they are absolutely unwilling to offer, and that they haven't offered for 5+ years.
Would you consider the statement "A flexible travel policy [link to outdated policy] is in place to support our guests" to be an inaccuracy in the document, even though it is literally true that a flexible travel policy is in place to support their guests?
If you would, how can you fail to consider the correct link to the correct policy as being "part of the document"?
I worry we're veering very much off topic, so let me state, for the benefit of anyone thinking that this is still about the original comment, that I consider the quote provided by abnercoimbre to be both correct and relevant to the submitted topic. The rest of this comment is not about that.
No, I do not consider a document to be a part of another document, unless it's embedded in the other document. I don't, for example, consider the RFC 2822 [1] to be a part of the RFC 5322 [2] event though they are obviously related and the latter refers (and, indeed, links) to the former. If, in a conversation about the 5322, someone quoted the 2822 without providing a reference to it, I would find it confusing.
As for "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, I'll have to admit that I don't have much experience with them, but from what I believe I know about them, I'd say that I would not consider the whole book to be a single document when it comes to referencing. Would it make sense to say something like "The adventure in the book ends with you caught by the security guard" if that is just one of the many alternative endings, one that many might not encounter when playing?
And expanding on that, would you consider it appropriate referencing to say "That is a crime according to the French criminal law" without specifying where it says that? (I'm assuming here that the French criminal law is a single document.)
The other example is interesting. I would consider a wrong (or broken) link to be an error in the document, but I would not consider erroneous statements in the linked document to be inaccuracies or errors in the linking document. Imagine that instead of an outdated policy, the linked document was one promoting homeopathy. Would you say that the original document contains misleading statements about healthcare? I would not.
The diversions were almost certainly for this reason. Crew scheduling, weight and balance, passenger manifests, flight plan filing with ATC for IFR, etc are all handled before takeoff, once it's in the air there's not much ground systems involvement required. But if all gates are occupied with outage impacted planes and space is tight or non-existent to stick more birds on location, have to drop it somewhere with room for dead birds. Could have also dropped it in a location with more anticipated crew availability when ops resumes, however much less likely given the outage ops likely didn't have a handle on that info or the ability to be planning ahead like that.
The alternative is seeing a news report that says "Sabotage by hostile nation and/or terrorists not ruled out!" - obviously the airline will do root-cause analysis and find out who screwed the pooch.
Well, as a senior developer I've deployed my fair share of crash-inducing bugs, probably something like that could be counted as "IT outage they brought on themselves" rather than outside factors.
Air travel sucks. I wasted 8 hours today and I won’t even get a lousy T shirt. I’m sure next time I can take my business to a different airline who will also be happy to not do any better.
If I didn't run, I would have missed the alternate, and Airfrance would have owed me like 700EUR plus an overnight stay with meals. I did them a favor. I requested reimbursement for my missed tax refund (which was <100EUR); some guy in India told me they weren't legally obligated to reimburse me, and closed the ticket.
Then you get the pleasure of a phone tree that only allows the option of giving feedback about the noise on the plane or the cleanliness.
Then once you get through and manage to plead your case you'll get quarterly emails about how your case is in review and sorry about the delay but you should have news next week.
Not bitter.
So in my case the next step is to find lawyer.
The only alternative to court is Consumer Disputes Board but their resolutions are just recommendations & Finnair has a long history of ignoring them so spending 2-3 years there seems like waste of time.
European airlines are not forthcoming with that compensation /at all/. They have entire teams, procedures, policies, strategies etc to avoid paying out
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ryanair/2195574-how-get-ryan...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1lg6aqp/ryan...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1d3908i/i_th...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1lnjmvm/file...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1o6muwv/ryan...
Every airline plays the game to some degree - it would be commercially incompetent to not use every possible angle to weasle out of it.
Switzerland might have options for small claims court claims online too
Some other airlines "swap planes" and do swapsies with every passengers, on every flights, if they get a morning delay; they trickle it down all day long. It's ridiculous seeing lines of people moving to another gate, all day. When your plane arrive at your gate, you know you're being moved to another line and the delayed passengers will get your plane. So that way, delays stay within the bounds!
Sickening, I'm never flying these airlines again.
I show up for a flight to Mordor scheduled departure at 8 am, you for a scheduled departure at 9:30 am.
The plane scheduled for the 8 am departure is unavailable (for whatever reason) and there's a plane that can board for a 9:30 departure... Shouldn't I get preference since my flight was scheduled to leave earlier? When the other plane becomes available or is replaced, your flight will go out on that (or whatever flight in the swapsies chain).
What alternative would you prefer:
a) Early flight has to wait, maximal delay for those passengers trading off with minimal delay for others
b) Something based on class of booking + airline status + time of booking, like they use for upgrades. Frequent fliers get minimal delay, ultra economy gets maximum delay
c) prefer passengers with connections that haven't yet been missed, otherwise a or b? Maybe just prefer passengers where makable connections avoid an overnight missed connection. This one makes systemic sense, but may not be easy to compute.
However, you have to be insistent, I first filed a complaint with the airline, and when they didn't comply in the given amount of time, I filed a complaint with their regulatory authority, and then suddenly the airline remembered me and gave me the money.
I believe the argument is that regulation encumbers airlines and, instead, the free market will incentivise participants to handle outages and delayed flights in a competitive way.
It seriously makes me not want to fly.
It is in no way comparable to insurance. Your only influence over the outcome is to commit fraud (which is in itself a massively -life EV proposition). You are at an unbelievable information disadvantage, because the insurance companies are the ones holding all of the cards and have counted them thoroughly.
You have not actually posited a way to gain an advantage in taking traveler's insurance. If it were a skill issue, you would have elaborated on the skills required to do so. Instead you simply suggested that having traveler's insurance at all is a skill issue, and when called out, deflected to completely irrelevant topics.
I think politically, everyone would want airlines to have working IT-systems and they would probably want to pay $100 (rationally, closer to $1000) amortized over 50 years to pay for that, but apparently humanity is just too stupid to make it work. (I am not the problem in this, because I try to be politically active when I have time, but humanity is just so fucking stupid that it's not even funny; I guess someone should invent an anti-lead; something to put in the water supply to add 30 IQ points, but that would probably be punishable by death, because no good deed goes unpunished in this hell scape.)
Not stupid, just corrupt :)
If we did this, the money would get misappropriated or stolen - most likely completely legally through overpaid consulting fees.
So clearly we should pay someone to prevent that from happening.
Wait a minute...
Which would just flow into the pockets of ClownStrike or some big consultancy and nothing would actually change.
What is the lost productivity for having so many people waiting on airports?
But that is consumer protection regulation and it is not going to happen in America in a few years
Why do you think we add iodine to salt?
You can't really add a bunch of fluorine ions to water because they'd all be negatively charged. We say we're adding "fluoride", but really we're adding ionic compounds that include fluoride.
This seems analogous to the difference between chlorinated water (toxic) and salt water (not at all toxic). It's always interesting to me that adding chlorine to water makes it poisonous, and adding sodium causes it to explode, but adding sodium chloride does... nothing in particular.
I struggle with the notion that a high quality airline operating system cannot be developed using technologies as of 2015. Most of what we are drowning in right now is the product of the last 10 years.
The last place we need fancy new shit is in air travel. This is precisely the kind of thing where you do want to call someone like IBM to install a mainframe. Failure of an airline's IT systems can begin to approach the kind of impact you get with a payment network outage.
It's not a tech problem, it's a culture problem. Just because the infrastructure is old does not mean that it is bad. The main deciding factor is how well it is maintained. But that is to hard for many people. So much easier to say "It'S bAd bEcAuSe iT is oLd" and walk away.
At the core of most airlines is a customized version of IBM TPF, its very reliable and highly available, its all of the other stuff that breaks down.
We will in time find out what grounded AS, I wouldnt be surprised if its some sort of middleware connecting their iPads to the CRS they use for ticketing operations, but it could also be something as simple as their weight and balance application going offline.
AS is a fairly well run airline (as are DL, AA and UA) with a heterogeneous mix of systems in service, ideally this heterogeneous nature should make for a more resilient system but it also can lead to single points of failure when you have to glue too many different systems together.
It’s easy to complain about modern airlines (and I do), but it’s still true that’s never been cheaper to fly, and IT infrastructure is surely no small part of that.
Oh, was that the reason we were stuck in Orlando, and the only airline that couldn’t fly out of SeaTac due to snow that day was the one with “Alaska” in its name? (Yes, literally every other airline at SeaTac that day was flying, if a bit delayed.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYzBJxOeLw
https://news.alaskaair.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Alaska...
:(
The circle in the image is an embedded PNG which has not been pngcrushed at all.
Instead of building a few gradients out, it looks like whoever did the export to svg out of Illustrator or whatever let it export this horrendously large circle. With a gradient. That costs 2.5MB.
A small excerpt of the memorable ones or where I was personally affected, but there have been many more over the period:
Holiday 2022 Southwest system collapse July 2024 Delta 5 day outage August 2025 United weight and balance outage June 2025 American outage October 2025 AWS outage impacting AS, AA, UA, DL
It's like once it goes down all state is lost and for a long time, often days, crews describe having to call in and wait while they figure it out who does what / goes where.
I don't like to oversimplify, but it really seems like a solvable problem ...
- providing hotel accommodations;
- arranging for ground transportation;
- providing meal vouchers; and
- arranging for air transportation on another air carrier or foreign air carrier to the passenger’s destination; as appropriate, based on your circumstances."
Still I think it would have been better for OP to link to the source to avoid exactly this confusion.
Most people will read both the comment and webpage, or neither. In either case there's no problem.
It's only your uncommon case of reading the comment, not reading the webpage, and yet still feeling confident in making assertions about the webpage contents, where there's an issue. But that's not common, and I daresay the issue is not on OP's end.
There’s a link at the top of Alaska Air’s home page. But your first thought was to go search Google instead?
(1) abnercoimbre (a) read through the document, (b) extracted the part of it that affected passengers are most likely to be interested in, and (c) helpfully provided a summary of that part;
(2) jabiko (a) didn't bother reading the document, (b) assumed abnercoimbre was lying about what it said, and (c) accused abnercoimbre of "spreading misinformation";
(3) The underlying problem here is that abnercoimbre's behavior was bad, whereas jabiko provided a reasonable response to seeing an entirely truthful summary that consisted only of a direct, unaltered quote from the primary source.
That's an interesting perspective. I might lean another way.
Mind you, I'm not defending jabiko here – I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable.
[1] https://news.alaskaair.com/on-the-record/alaska-statement-on...
[2] https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-advisori...
But you're wrong about that. Would you consider a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book to be a couple hundred documents, or just one?
The text abnercoimbre quoted was explicitly referenced on the page as being the airline's policy toward affected "guests". Anyone looking for that information would have found it, because... it's included in the document. It's not like the quote was pulled from the "investor relations" page after abnercoimbre clicked a link in the generic site-wide topbar for no reason.
Try a different angle: suppose that link to the travel policy went to an outdated page that Alaska Airlines disavowed. The old page, for whatever reason, specifies a set of benefits that they are absolutely unwilling to offer, and that they haven't offered for 5+ years.
Would you consider the statement "A flexible travel policy [link to outdated policy] is in place to support our guests" to be an inaccuracy in the document, even though it is literally true that a flexible travel policy is in place to support their guests?
If you would, how can you fail to consider the correct link to the correct policy as being "part of the document"?
No, I do not consider a document to be a part of another document, unless it's embedded in the other document. I don't, for example, consider the RFC 2822 [1] to be a part of the RFC 5322 [2] event though they are obviously related and the latter refers (and, indeed, links) to the former. If, in a conversation about the 5322, someone quoted the 2822 without providing a reference to it, I would find it confusing.
As for "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, I'll have to admit that I don't have much experience with them, but from what I believe I know about them, I'd say that I would not consider the whole book to be a single document when it comes to referencing. Would it make sense to say something like "The adventure in the book ends with you caught by the security guard" if that is just one of the many alternative endings, one that many might not encounter when playing?
And expanding on that, would you consider it appropriate referencing to say "That is a crime according to the French criminal law" without specifying where it says that? (I'm assuming here that the French criminal law is a single document.)
The other example is interesting. I would consider a wrong (or broken) link to be an error in the document, but I would not consider erroneous statements in the linked document to be inaccuracies or errors in the linking document. Imagine that instead of an outdated policy, the linked document was one promoting homeopathy. Would you say that the original document contains misleading statements about healthcare? I would not.
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2822
[2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322
https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1oejonu/system_wid...
How does that work? What is it about a computer outage in your parent company that affects whether you're able to make an already-scheduled landing?
- Whether parent company has the capacity to service your plane at the landing location
- Whether parent company has the capacity to handle boarding new passengers for the next flight at landing location
- Whether parent company can get next flight off the ground from landing location
- "Risk" management by sending planes and passengers where parent company thinks it has better ability to recover to normal operations
- And probably a bunch more only people who work in that industry would think of
Can we really use the phrase "IT outage" as if it's an explaination in and of itself?