After the acquisition by Delta, former employees say Comair IT executives didn’t do the kind of thorough management analysis that might have persuaded the parent airline to invest in a replacement system before it was too late. Instead, Delta kept a lid on capital expenditures at Comair, with unfortunate consequences. The failure of the almost 20-year-old scheduling system not only saddled Delta with a plethora of customer service and financial headaches that the airline could ill afford but it also provides a cautionary tale for any company that thinks it can operate on its legacy systems for just...one...more...day.

The five-year plan that wasn’t

Today, Cincinnati-based Comair is a regional airline that operates in 117 cities and carries about 30,000 passengers on 1,130 flights a day, with three or four crew members on each. But back in 1984, when Jim Dublikar joined the company as director of finance and risk management, Comair had just 25 airplanes and not a jet among them. Dublikar, who served as Comair’s director of risk management and information technology from 1992 until 1999, explains that back then, flight crew managers did all their scheduling with pen and paper. But in 1986, Comair leased software from SBS that kept track of crews, the flights they were assigned to and how many hours they were flying, in order to be in compliance with union and federal regulations.

The system worked just fine.

In 1993, Comair bought a jet—the first Bombardier CRJ regional jet in the industry, in fact. The company grew swiftly. But by 1996, other regional contenders such as American Eagle, Mesa and Continental Express acquired their own jets, and Comair lost its competitive advantage. "At that point, the playing field had gotten pretty even," says Dublikar, now an airline consultant. "So we had to start looking at ways of doing things better and more efficiently."

Over the years, Comair, like most airlines, had acquired a hodgepodge of applications—from crew scheduling to aircraft maintenance to passenger booking engines. "We had several systems that were getting pretty long in the tooth—around for seven, eight, nine years," Dublikar says.

Unfortunately, you can’t see a crew management system age the way you can see an airplane rust. But they do. "These systems are just like physical assets," says Mike Childress, former Delta CTO and now vice president of applications and industry frameworks for EDS. "They become brittle with age, and you have to take great care in maintaining them."