A computer glitch at All Nippon Airways Co. caused chaos Sunday when it forced the company to cancel or delay almost 400 flights, leaving about 57,400 people stranded for hours.
photoPassengers form long lines Sunday afternoon at Haneda airport in Tokyo due to ticketing problems arising from a computer glitch. (Satoru Sekiguchi/ The Asahi Shimbun)
Flights departing Tokyo's Haneda Airport resumed from about 6 p.m., but only after 126 flights had been cancelled. Most had been scheduled to depart from Haneda or Osaka's Itami airport.
Another 252 flights were delayed by at least an hour.
ANA officials said the computer system that handles reservations and ticketing for the carrier's domestic flights had been experiencing problems from early Sunday.
Computer technicians called in to investigate the malfunction were unable to fix it until about 3:30 p.m.
ANA officials said they were still trying to determine the cause.
The problem affected the network that linked ANA's host computer in Tokyo with airport ticket counters. Ticket agents were forced to issue tickets manually, causing long delays and longer queues.
The glitch affected almost half of ANA's 818 scheduled Sunday flights.
Three other airlines--Air Do, Skynet Asia Airways and IBEX Airlines--all of which share ANA's computer system, also experienced delays.
The large number of cancelled and delayed flights was attributed to the fact that ANA's reservations and ticketing computer system is directly linked to the system that manages flight operations.
Beleaguered airline staff were forced to manually assign seats to passengers, and then confirm that they had boarded the plane on which their bags were loaded.(IHT/Asahi: May 28,2007)
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