What’s crazy is that this is the list of things that are wrong when everything is going right.

I was at O’hare for the first time in a few decades a few weeks ago and my flight was delayed due to some mechanical issue with the assigned plane. At least that’s what the app said. Because of the delay, the gate kept changing. We were supposed to know this because every once in a while the gate we were at no longer said it was our flight, so there must be some other location. I think at least one of the times it was mentioned over the PA, but besides the flight number everything else was unintelligible.

We see other flights to our destination that were scheduled after ours from the same airline on the same type of plane boarding and leaving. It doesn’t matter that our tickets were from earlier in the day. They’ve already screwed over 150 passengers. Screwing them over more is far less bad than delaying them slightly but having to also delay later flights by a little bit, too. I think we watched three flights leave. As a group of six, with four children, the likelihood of standby coming through on any of these is less than zero.

On the departure board the flight was referred to by a carrier other than the one we bought the tickets from, because of course everyone should know every carrier’s partner airlines and how their flight numbers map.

Three hours of delay had arrived but the plane was finally at the gate. FAA says I’m entitled to a meal for the delay, so I go ask how to redeem it. I’m told to go back to customer service near security and stand in a line to get a voucher. But if I miss the flight, there’s nothing they can do about it. I’m sure that’s not how that’s supposed to work, but I’m several hours delayed already, my plans for the day are shot, missing the flight it really an option just so I can get some airport food.

The time has arrived to start boarding. I’m on chat complaining about the service when it disconnects. The app stops working, so I check the airline’s website, and get a hard down, unstyled error message. I tell my wife that something seems wrong with their site and have my suspicion confirmed a few minutes later that their entire system is down and all flights are halted until further notice. No ETA.

At this point Reddit has more information about what’s happening than the gate agent. It’s another 45 minutes before a mumbly PA announcement tells us flights are delayed due to a global system wide outage.

Fortunately, their IT staff seemed to be on it, and the whole thing only lasted an hour. Then they put us on the plane like nothing happened and even got people to cheer for the crap service. Ice water in hell, I suppose.

> We see other flights to our destination that were scheduled after ours from the same airline on the same type of plane boarding and leaving.

I feel like there is a lot more to the fungibility of planes. E.g. add just one more consideration, like bag loading, to the scenario and suddenly you end up with a mess of not great answers for a whole complex tree of things unless you somehow know with certainty how long the fix is actually going to take ahead of time. The more of these additional considerations you add, the more they start interacting with each other and the less likely "just switch the planes" only means passing the delay along.

There’s been a bunch of airline IT meltdowns in recent years, some much much worse than what you described. Airlines just decided IT is a “cost center” and decided not to maintain it.