US senators Richard Blumenthal and Edward Markey have sent letters to all major airlines in the US expressing concerns over IT vulnerabilities.
It was prompted by two recent outages which caused widespread disruption for Southwest Airlines and Delta passengers.
"We are concerned with recent reports indicating that airlines’ IT systems may be susceptible to faltering because of the way they are designed and have been maintained," wrote the Democratic senators.
"Now that four air carriers control approximately 85 percent of domestic capacity, all it takes is one airline to experience an outage and thousands of passengers could be stranded."
Southwest Airlines, which lost millions of dollars after a faulty router grounded more than 2,000 flights in July, said it had spent ‘significant effort and financial investment to ensure the technology that supports our business and our operation has back-up and recovery capabilities."
Delta’s IT meltdown last week caused the cancelation of more than 3,000 flights despite the outage lasting just six hours.
The Senators asked the airlines for comments to a number of questions posed, relating to current initiatives to modernize IT systems and details on their back-up systems, and their policy on rebooking and compensation in the event of a major system-wide outage.
