The FAA has ordered a ground stop for all Alaska Airlines flights.

[Ocelot II]

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-faa-issues-ground-stop-advisory-alaska-airlines-2024-04-17/

[AllyCat]

1. Wow. No reason given.

Maybe related to the passenger incident earlier?

[Pretty Fly]

4. Sounds like it's due to a systems upgrade.

Crazy time to do it, tho lol

[MontanaMama]

7. Why is it a crazy time?

Updates happen all the time and we never hear about them. This one failed, apparently, and people in charge did the right thing by grounding the fleet.

Welcome to DU.

[Pretty Fly]

12. Thanks. And I'd assume an update during the non-busy hours would have made more sense.

As someone who used to handle system updates for customer-facing systems, we always tried to schedule them around non-peak times to avoid mass-scale inconvenience.

But it sounds like this was an update related to a system issue which is different than just a random update.

[gopiscrap]

15. welcome to du

[angrychair]

2. I would hate

To be any IT person in any way connected to that update.
Not sure what their QA and testing process was but it clearly wasn't enough.

[Nittersing]

3. CNBC reported that the airline's system used to calculate weight and balance for flights was not functioning correctly.

That's the story.

[Ocelot II]

5. That's a serious problem - can't dispatch an airplane without correct W&B data.

If it's wrong, takeoff speeds, runway requirements, etc., would be inaccurate and, worst case, could result in a crash.

[hatrack]

6. Jesus . . .

Like the Gimli Glider X 1,000,000.

[Ocelot II]

9. That was a case of fuel starvation because they used the wrong measurements

to figure the fuel load. Wrong weight and balance data is really a takeoff problem - airplane could be too heavy, runway too short, etc.

[hatrack]

10. Thinking more in terms of systems in place vs. update . . .

767s were the first all-metric American-built aircraft, IIRC, but Air Canada was still using both metric and English measurements simultaneously (uggh).

[Ocelot II]

11. Yes, it was definitely not a good idea to try to use both systems at once.

A screw-up was inevitable, and this was an especially bad one.

[hatrack]

13. Good thing the pilot had lots of glider hours!

Seriously, that and Sioux City (check pilot dead-heading as a passenger on the flight) are about as close as I let myself get to using the word "miraculous" regarding any in-flight failure.

[Ocelot II]

14. And that they were able to get to that disused airstrip.

SUX was another one, also the A320 in the Hudson River. Ditchings are almost never successful.

[Kaleva]

8. Hand out complimentary parachutes