Crew legality resets
Delayed crews can run into duty-time limits, forcing reassignments that ripple across unrelated flights well after the outage ends.
Airline
A grounded fleet costs by the minute.
Airline IT outages rarely stay contained to one system — a check-in or dispatch failure cascades into delayed departures, missed connections, and days of schedule recovery. Defaults below reflect that scale; replace with your own fleet and revenue data.
Scroll for cascading delay
Why it cascades
One system down, days of recovery.
Airline operations are a tightly coupled network of crew, aircraft, and gate schedules. A single dispatch or crew-scheduling outage rarely resolves when the system comes back — the schedule itself needs hours or days to reset.
Aircraft position drift
Aircraft out of position after a delay cascade require additional repositioning flights, adding direct cost beyond the original outage window.
Rebooking and goodwill cost
Passenger rebooking, hotel vouchers, and compensation claims typically dwarf the direct IT recovery cost of the original incident.
FAQ
Airline outage cost, answered.
Questions that come up when sizing the cost of an airline IT outage.
Why is airline downtime so much more expensive than other industries?
The cost is rarely contained to the outage window — schedule cascades, crew legality resets, and aircraft repositioning extend the financial impact well past technical recovery.
What should I use for the revenue impact input?
A common starting point is estimated revenue per operating hour across affected systems, plus an allowance for rebooking, vouchers, and compensation liability.
Why is the default incident frequency low?
Airlines typically invest heavily in redundancy for safety-critical and operations systems, which lowers frequency even though the cost per incident is high.
Are there real examples of this?
Yes — major airline IT outages have grounded entire fleets for days. See the case studies section (coming soon) for named examples with public cost figures.
Share