Technical debt

ON New Year's Day, chaos erupted at the Philippines' Ninoy Aquino International Airport after a failure in the uninterruptible power supply equipment being used by the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, triggering the technical problems that disrupted hundreds of flights and left tens of thousands of travelers stranded.

In December last year in the US, severe weather conditions caused thousands of Southwest Airlines flight cancellations and escalated into a complete meltdown of its flight system. It is blamed on the company's failure to modernize its scheduling systems, relying only on older or deficient software that needs updating for several years.