Someone is tracking all of the tech glitches affecting US air travel

It seems like we can't go a day without reading about — or being affected by — some kind of airline-related technical glitch. There have been computer issues that have kept hundreds of flights on the ground, check-in problems that have forced airport employees to pass out handwritten boarding passes, and unexplained "connectivity issues" that leave frustrated passengers walking in anxious circles around the airport.

[embed]

[/embed]

OK, so it might be an exaggeration to say that it happens every day; according to Quartz, it has actually been six days since a U.S. carrier has experienced a serious technical issue. The site has created a dashboard to track and examine the various tech gremlins that have affected domestic air travel this year and, so far, there have been 13 major incidents, involving seven carriers (United alone has endured three separate website, connectivity and dispatching problems), one airport and two government agencies.

The most recent incident occurred on October 29, when Alaska Airlines had to grit its teeth during a computer system malfunction that delayed 20 late night flights from Portland International Airport and forced airline employees to manually check passengers in.

Quartz writer David Yanovsky said that the site has started cataloguing these issues because, well, no one else is. He wrote:

"Recently, these glitches have been cropping up with great frequency. There is no official record of them; the Federal Aviation Administration says the problems aren’t generally under its purview. That makes it difficult to compare the rate of incidents in 2015 to prior years or evaluate if there are systemic issues in need of fixing."

So far, he theorizes that the problems could be related to aging aviation systems. I guess we'll all see what causes the next one — because there will be a next one. The only question is when.