The comparisons you chose are terrible. We don't have widespread autonomous vehicles. Rockets are complicated but primarily constrained by knowable physics problems. Social media sites are entirely digital systems that do not need to deal with the complexity of the real world and, where they do (like networking connections), they're built on abstractions to manage that complexity.

Logistics problems, especially the logistics of moving humans, are both complicated and complex. You are talking about systems which must interact with manual, human-in-the-loop processes every step of the way. The feedback loops between the digital systems and physical systems are often loose and very costly to tighten (regulations, union rules, passenger behaviors) and the underlying systems that all participants must interact with were some of the very first widespread digital systems.

Today's problem was probably preventable, but don't underestimate how hard the problems become as soon as a system begins to depend on humans and the real world.

I think if we want to we will always find a reason to say that technology can’t or isn’t the right solution to fix this.

And that’s why we’re in this position to begin with… until someone comes along to disrupt it.

I didn’t say that technology can’t fix this, I’m just saying that you’re talking about a complex, physical, adaptive, human in-the-loop system. It doesn’t get much harder than that. You can automat every single part of it, but there’s still human passengers involved so it only takes one asshole to cause a gate delay. There’s no such thing as a perfect system for this. There is better, but there’s not perfect.

Javascript won't put an airplane and the right combinations of crews in a combination of airports no matter how many lines of code you write.

For actual mission critical systems, like delivering packages, UPS Airlines uses a cool concept called a hot spares where an extra airplane is somewhere in the sky, ready to take on slack if there were issues on another plane

I've made this same comment in other replies but none of those examples present the kind of labor issues an airline has. If your essential workers don't show up / quit and operations grind to a halt then no amount of technology is going to fix that

> there is no reason any of this could not have been prevented by a solid engineering design

Not unless this new CTO's roadmap includes development of a time machine. Engineering design alone will not prevent this kind of outcome.

There can be a lot of improvements made to the current experience. Why couldn’t I rebook my cancelled flight through the app? Why couldn’t I be told which baggage claim to reclaim the bags from my cancelled flight? Why did I have to wait two hours to talk to a southwest agent to get a refund? Why did I have to ask for southwest to reimburse me for the damages?

Why couldn’t all of these things be handled easily through the app?

Maybe it won’t prevent my flight from being cancelled, but when they do cancel my flight I’m not left scrambling to figure a plan B so I don’t miss meeting my family for the holidays.