What American Airlines Learned From the CrowdStrike Outage
The company reflects on the experience in detail for the first time.
Inside American’s operations nerve center in Fort Worth.
Photographer: Matthew Johnson for Bloomberg Businessweek
At about 12:30 a.m. on July 19, Jessica Tyler was awakened by a phone call from work. That in itself is not unusual. Tyler is in charge of American Airlines Group Inc.’s Integrated Operations Center, located just outside Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The IOC is American’s nerve center, managing the carrier’s more than 6,000 daily flights.
The range of problems the IOC has to deal with is dizzying: winter storms and summer hurricanes, mechanical failures and the occasional volcanic ash cloud. Every decision the people there make must take into account a lengthy list of factors, including the maintenance and replacement schedules for the myriad parts in every plane in the fleet and the collectively bargained time limits on the people who staff them. If Air Force One flies into one of American’s hubs, halting everything there for a few hours, that’s an IOC problem. If there’s a Taylor Swift concert in town and no hotel rooms available for overnighting American flight crews, that’s another one. As Tyler puts it, “it’s managed chaos.”