[clmns]

Interesting. I worked on the support team for the software that creates and files the flightplans for UAL. It was a horrible piece of SW/architecture with many outages. We tested in production daily and had direct access to the databases. I'm pretty sure they never changed their policies.. So yeah, this sounds very much like it!

Edit: Just got confirmation, this software was the root cause. No hacks/whatsoever!

[tfe]

This is what I love about HN. There are people that actually worked on x system-in-the-news wandering around. Thanks!

[dopamean]

Good thing no one on the internet ever lies.