Why is the preservation of onboard data so important?

Usually, when we think of airlines suffering data loss due to downtime, we tend to focus on the chaos this scenario creates at the check-in counter or at the gate. Lack of access to, or even loss of, booking data certainly sounds like the airline's worst nightmare.

For example, in 2017, Delta Airlines had two system-wide blackouts in six months, which cost the company an estimated $ 100 million. Delta isn't the only airline to experience IT disruptions. In the same year, Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights due to a router failure, at an estimated cost of $ 54 million.

So why is it so important to keep data on board?

Data loss is becoming more than just a customer experience crisis for airlines. A significant amount of data is generated during flight. So much so that NASA has partnered with Southwest Airlines to develop a data mining application that will allow the airline to manage everything.

NASA said in a press release that "When an aircraft is in flight, hundreds of streams of data are sent out every second — pilot reports, incident reports, control positions, instrument positions, warning modes." It is data that protects the lives of passengers and enables predictive analysis to “find problems before they become incidents.”

The Stratus Downtime Prevention Buyer's Guide explains that the reason downtime negatively impacts all of this volume of data in transit is that “when a system crash occurs, all data and transactions that have not yet been written to disk are subject to risk of loss or damage. “This means that data that can be used to predict and prevent future disasters could be lost forever.

The manual recommends that when installing or upgrading technology, airlines are asked the question, "How does your solution store flight data?" Stratus emphasizes that while failure may be “bearable” for some applications, “loss of in-flight data can have serious consequences, ranging from dropped packet or lost revenue to compliance issues or even loss of life.”

“Many availability solutions are not designed to provide transactional and data integrity in the event of a system failure. Depending on the hardware configuration, stand-alone servers and HA clusters can usually maintain the integrity of database transactions, but any data in memory not yet written to disk will be lost in the event of a failure. "

The guide states that “fault tolerant solutions are designed from the ground up to provide a higher level of data integrity. Fully replicated hardware components and mirrored memory ensure that all ongoing transactions are preserved - even if a hardware component fails. "

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