Originally Posted by
MikeMpls
NW's PARS is also a dinosaur built originally on S/360 systems in the 1960's. My take on it is that switching to PARS would be one step forward, 3/4 step back.
I did a bit of Googling (wikipedia has a
very limited article on the subject), but it looks like there's more to it. It appears Pars is a reservation system, whereas Deltamatic is a full airline control system. Pars is like a subset of Deltamatic, and while Pars does some things better, Deltamatic is the backbone of all operations. Lots of the stuff we were seeing at OCC is based on Deltamatic; remember when the meteorologist told us about how critical it is to predict how much fuel to load? (It takes 1/4 gallon of fuel to carry one gallon of fuel, and if you overload, costs go up dramatically; and Deltamatic helps them determine that).
So, they couldn't just do a Pars vs. Deltamatic choice, and nwa.com won't plug into Deltamatic.