Computerworld reports that JetBlue’s flight delays and cancellations days after the northeast ice storms on Feb 14 were due to an IT systems meltdown in Overwhelmed IT systems partly to blame for JetBlue meltdown.Now bad weather should be nothing new for a major airline and getting flight schedules back to ‘normal’ after them should be something that they can respond to within a reasonable amount of time. So it begs the question whenever any airline fails to handle this type of crisis efficiently.

“So while we were dispatching people to the airports to help, which was great, they weren’t trained to actually use the computer system. So we’re going through a process now where we’re actively training those crew members.”

This sounds a lot more like real flaws in operations management and crisis management. In fact, it sounds to me that JetBlue’s IT department really came to the rescue in this crisis:

JetBlue’s IT department developed a database that allowed the airline’s scheduling team to improve multitasking… the system, which was developed in 24 hours and implemented in the middle of JetBlue’s crisis, has now been implemented as a full-time system

Some interesting stats on JetBlue (From the Feb/07 Air Travel Consumer Report )

• In the 12 months ending Dec/06, JetBlue ranked 16 out of 20 (72.9%) in on time arrivals.
• Dec/06 8.9% of regularly scheduled flights arrived late 70% of the time or more. This is higher than any other airline
• The report breaks down late arriving flights by cause. For JetBlue in Dec/06, 5.88% of flights were delays attributed to the carrier vs 0.21% that were due to extreme weather.
• JetBlue had one of the lowest flight cancellation rates 0f 0.4%

I’m picking at various data points, but this doesn’t look to me like an isolated problem. Are JetBlue’s systems really overwhelmed or are they simply over capacity and can’t respond fast enough when weather or other issues cause significant delays?