In the good old days, I’d arrive at the airport half an hour before a flight was scheduled to depart — and I had friends who made a habit of rushing into the terminal five minutes before departure. If I had a suitcase to check, I’d give it to a friendly baggage porter at curbside, get a luggage receipt with a smile, then stroll through the terminal — no metal detectors or security lines — and pick up a boarding pass from an equally friendly airline employee at the gate. At least, I think that’s how things used to work; it’s been such a long time that such memories are beginning to blur. Maybe it’s only in the movies that I remember seeing such things, along with clips of happy travelers taking cross-country trips on sparkling-clean trains, with good food and comfortable seats.

Fast forward to the present: I arrived at LaGuardia this morning at the ungodly hour of 5 AM, in order to catch a 6 AM flight to Pittsburgh. It was a day trip, so I had no luggage to check; who knows if I would have been able to find a baggage porter anyway… In any case, the US Airways terminal was almost empty at that hour, and I was delighted to see that all of the automated check-in kiosks were empty. The delight turned into puzzlement: every kiosk had a piece of paper taped on the display screen, which read, “This kiosk is temporarily unavailable.” Huh: one or two non-functioning kiosks wouldn’t be a big deal — but all of them down? So I got in an old-fashioned line, and waited to talk to an old-fashioned ticket agent, who produced a boarding pass without uttering a single word, let alone a smile. And then it was on to the security line, where I went through the now-familiar ritual of taking off my shoes, my overcoat, and my sport jacket; took the laptop out of its case, and various other electronic gadgets out of various pockets, shoved all of this into three grubby plastic trays, started towards the metal detector, went back to the grubby trays to retrieve my boarding pass to show the security guard … well, you know the routine.

It was only later that I learned, from a fellow traveler, that all of the check-in kiosks were down because US Airways had switched to a new reservations and ticketing system two days earlier, in order to replace the separate systems that had previously been used by America West Airlines and US Airways before their merger last year. And other passengers muttered that it wasn’t just LaGuardia: similar problems had occurred in various other airports across the country. I don’t know why I didn’t hear about it earlier, but a quick search on the Internet tonight retrieved a CNN article, entitled “US Airways’ new computer system creates logjam.” It seems that the problems affected passengers attempting to check in at US Airways terminals in Las Vegas, Charlotte, Phoenix, and Philadelphia.

After a day-long business meeting, I returned to the airport in Pittsburgh with the unhappy expectation of being stuck in line for hours. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that all of the automated kiosks — at least in that airport — appeared to be functioning. If everything is back to normal in all the other cities, that means that the disruption lasted for approximately three days. For passengers, it was probably not much more than just a moderate nuisance; and for the programmers involved in developing the system, it probably meant three sleepless nights, desperately fixing bugs and restarting systems. Somehow, I doubt that we’ll ever hear any details of what went wrong…