Today, I will tell you about it. Even with my colleagues, I don't mention or discuss one semi-secret application that my group developed and maintains. It is the dreaded Crisis Management Tool (CMT) but today I'll tell you a little about it. Even accounting for my tendency to exaggerate, I feel that I have aged two years since Sep 11. But before that, let's draw some boundaries so that what I am typing doesn't turn into a novella. (Brevity is for the lazy, but succinctness is hard work.) The way I had divided things after Sep 11, there were three strands of drama unfolding and plaiting themselves endlessly. One, the public nightmare, fed and fuelled by CNN and all the other channels. Two, in its 75th year of existence, United Airlines was getting into the biggest hole it had ever gotten into financially, plus we had to do a never-before attempted cold start. Three, the job cuts and layoffs, which stung a lot deeper than the other two for those who had to go through them. What really sapped me every day, and made it difficult to leave the bed in the mornings were the layoffs. I had to make (and participate in) a lot of painful decisions a la Sophie's Choice about our own staff. I steeled myself and did what I felt was right for the company, but I don't really want to discuss that here. Most of you (if not already jaded into brainlessness) know a lot more about the media coverage than I do. Thanks to instant worldwide communications, the whole world could share the unfolding terror in unison. I was hoping that the coverage would have ended by now, but which network in its right mind would let this bonanza go? It appears that we are still stuck at A: Attacks, Afghanistan, and now Anthrax. And so, I will write about the second one -- struggling to get the airline back on its feet. On Sep 11, I set off for the office an hour earlier than normal, because I had a 9am meeting. Since Rupal was not with me, I was listening to a tape of Tamil songs instead of the NPR news radio. So I had missed whatever was on the news. At the entrance, the office security guard stopped me somewhat rudely, studied my ID hard and matched it to my face and let me in. My colleague Balan stopped me just as I got off the elevator. 'Ram, did you hear? One of our planes crashed into a building!' 'What?!' This is an airline employee's worst nightmare. I am slightly ashamed now but my first thought was actually about one software application that my group was responsible for -- CMT. But at another level, I must have intuited about the passengers, because my stomach clenched and started to hurt, which is my body's way of responding to bad news. I shot off a quick mail to some of you saying I was safe. By the time I gathered for the first (of countless) crisis meetings the rumors and the buzz had increased the number to five of our planes missing or crashing into various D.C. landmarks, and there was a rumor that the military had shot one down. And then the first of the WTC buildings collapsed. Airline apocalypse had arrived unannounced. Okay, back to my promise. The Crisis Management Tool, (CMT) is a simple enough web presentation tool, with all the information you could ever want to see about the plane, its maintenance history, the fuel it was carrying, the passenger load, the pilots and flight attendants' personal information. It was what all the senior executive officers of our company use to make the post-crisis decisions and to field the press. My group had finally succeeded in getting it to work after months of small issues. It had worked properly for the first time for a surprise test on August 28th, only two weeks before September 11th. Let me also share a little bit of United's mainframe trivia with you. The mainframe computer provides CMT with all the information to be displayed. Until about a year ago, in the mainframe system, there was only enough space provided to handle one 'incident' at a time. Since aircraft accident probabilities are in the 10-8 what are the chances of two incidents happening, right? Then some wise guy came up with the thought: what if two of our planes crashed into each other? And so they built disk storage space for information worth two flights. And thus we were saved. If UA had lost one more plane, we would have been shamed because of a lack of automated information. (This shortcoming has since been corrected.) For the next 24-48 hours, I was in and out of the crisis center, watching everything unfolding around me as if I was an outside observer. My team specializes in Irregular Operations Recovery. Our mandate is to help the airline get back on track. United had the rudiments of a plan by 3pm on the 11th, though I cannot honestly say that we are recovered fully today. They say of the 800-mile TransAlaska pipeline that oil has to flow without ever stopping, for if the oil freezes, restarting it is a near impossibility. And when our airline had frozen to a complete stop and we were woefully short of start-up kits. I spent two nights in the office (one 30-hour stint) and countless more hours helping out. A manual start is physically easy, but to get all the data back into the computer databases was the real challenge. Files that arrive every midnight failed to materialize, further confusing our computer systems. How do you get a grounded airline back on its feet? It was a theoretical problem that every technical minded person would love, if you could set the tragic aspects aside. Without boring you with all the details, think of aircraft re-positioning (from hitherto unheard of airports in Canada), think of tracking 10,000 pilots and getting them to their new starting positions, the same for 25,000 flight attendants. Then think of predicting the need to get all the stranded passengers home and (more important to the airline's long term health) predicting the demand for flights in the following weeks. In the last two weeks, my group has been assisting in contacting the 2 millions passengers who booked for Thanksgiving and Christmas a long time ago, but whose flight times have gotten changed (or even cancelled altogether) which means the airline is obligated to both rebook them on a feasible option. And also that we have to contact them and let them know of what we have done to their trips. This nightmare has to end, doesn't it? In tough times, even little things seem nourishing -- gifts to be treasured. Here are some of the little things that have kept me going in the past two months. I was thrilled to hear an A.R. Rahman number in my local NPR (National Public Radio) station, where he was said to represent popular music in India. Rupal entered a photography competition in October in the Lombard Camera Club, and one of her slides was judged to the best for the month (in its category). I also received some great news -- not one but two of my cousins getting engaged. (Only after hearing this did I realize that I haven't seen either of them in a sari. Not surprising since they have made salwars the mandatory standard-issue uniforms for all young women in India.) Heartfelt congrats to both Shoba and Chitra. And on an unseasonably cold day in October, when the pouring rain flooded our office parking lot, forcing me to park far far away, I saw two ducks swimming serenely in the parking lot. Ram Prasad November 2001 BACK