Highlighting the legacy of these core systems will be a meeting next month hosted by Qantas in Sydney. Joining Australia's international flag carrier at the meeting will be many of the world's great airlines including Lufthansa, Air France, US Air and Cathay Pacific.
The airlines meeting in Sydney are members of the Unisys Airline Users Association. Unisys (originally Univac) was one of two companies that developed the enormously complex reservations systems for airlines. The other was IBM.
Qantas uses systems from both companies. It inherited a domestic reservations based on Unisys when it took over TAA in the early 90s. Qantas was using IBM-based systems for its passenger reservation system and systems from Unisys for its cargo business.
While newer applications have been developed in the PC environment, airlines recognise the need to re-develop those core systems, according to Gary Cook, general manager of enterprise systems at Qantas.
"It's something all airlines have been saying for the past 20 years," Cook said. "We've engineered newer applications around those core systems - such as frequent flyer programs and e-commerce - but in the end we are constrained by those core legacy systems," he said.
Robustness vs. volume
One of the reasons the core systems have lasted so long as been their inherent robustness.
"When TAA and Qantas developed those original systems, we were looking at about 20 transactions a second," Cook said.
"At Qantas we're now running at a peak rate of 400 transactions a second but the largest airlines would be running at 7000 transactions a second.
"You need a system that can handle that volume 24 hours a day, seven days a week year after year. With PCs, Unix boxes and everything else that's around you just don't have - at this stage - the capability to do that. But it's coming," Cook said.
Skills in short supply
One of the problems that Qantas and other airlines continually face in running these legacy systems, is finding and keeping the people needed to maintain them.
"While much of the core system was developed using assembler, Cobol and Fortran, new developments are done in C++. The high transaction processing needs very short transaction paths and the most efficient way of doing that is assembler."
"Finding the people to keep these systems going is a major issue for all airlines," Cook said.
"We specifically tell people about the type of system they will be working on - it won't be client-server. It's a reservations system. We are using products that assist the programmers - such as front-end client server type products. It suits some of the people we hire and not others," Cook said.
