United playing catch-up

This morning's two-hour computer failure that forced the airline to stop service for two hours doesn't seem to be causing that many problems for flights coming into LAX. By the current overloaded standards it's actually looking like a fairly normal day. A check of the United flight status shows that several JFK-LAX flights were an hour or so late this morning, but the 11 a.m. flight - that's three hours after the system was back up - was only a couple of minutes late getting off the ground and should arrive here on time. Worldwide, hundreds of flights were impacted in some way by the massive computer shutdown, which airline experts call very unusual. United's breakdown involved the Unimatic computer that's used to dispatch flights. From Bloomberg:

The Unimatic system "handles all the operational parts of the airline,'' said Rick Maloney, a former United vice president for flight operations who is now dean of the aviation college at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. "That system is so well protected,'' Maloney said in an interview. ``I'm really pretty surprised.''

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Today's delays will add to the industry's tardiness so far this year. U.S. airlines managed only 72.5 percent of flights on time this year through April, the worst rate since the federal government began keeping track in the current format in 1995, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.