In 1998, Dublikar and his IT steering committee brought in consultants from Sabre, the Southlake, Texas-based airline software and consulting company, to create a long-term IT strategy to address the issue of legacy systems and architecture. The consultants spent five months meeting with IT’s various constituents in the business to find out what their needs were. They examined the airline’s existing IT infrastructure and suggested a five-year strategic plan outlining (among other things) which systems needed to be retired, replaced or added, and a time line for doing so.

The crew scheduling system was marked for retirement. SBS was no longer "the only game in town," recalls Dublikar, and the case for replacing the system was pretty easy to make. "The application was getting old. There was risk there, and there was new technology out there," he adds. "There were even financial benefits to replacing the system in terms of crew productivity and expenses that could be controlled better in a new system."

But this was 1998, and for the next two years, Y2K absorbed most of IT’s attention. By 1999, a significant amount of the work that had been laid out in the five-year plan (including Y2K remediation) had been completed or was under way—including implementing an e-ticketing system, upgrading the corporate network, replacing the maintenance and engineering system (another high-risk legacy system written in Cobol), and implementing a revenue management application.

The replacement of the crew scheduling system was among those next on the list. But after nearly 15 years in use, the business had grown accustomed to the SBS system, and much of Comair’s crew management business processes had grown directly out of it. Just look at a pilot’s contract at Comair; the definition of a workday is lifted straight out of the old SBS crew management application and expressed in Julian minutes the way the system did. (There are 44,640 Julian minutes in a 31-day month.) "That’s the reason why it’s almost impossible to replace these systems," says John Parker, former airline CIO and 17-year Delta veteran, now CIO of A.G. Edwards & Sons.

But systems requirements had been defined, and the IT department was in the software selection process. Final vendor selection was slated for 2000, according to Dublikar.

But then, in the middle of 1999, Dublikar left Comair, and shortly afterward, Delta announced its plans to acquire Comair.

Hands off at Delta

To Delta, buying Comair—one of its most profitable regional partners—was a no-brainer. It made money. It was an industry leader in on-time, cancellation and missed baggage statistics. And it was a stock market darling. "Before Delta came in, Comair was one of the best managed and most successful regionals in the country," says Holly Hegeman, an airline industry analyst and founder of PlaneBusiness.com. "They had the reputation of being the top dog."