clmns

AICs flight planning software (Sabre Flight Plan Manager) has had this capability for ages. This was simply a regulatory restriction for them that was also mapped inside the software.

Yeah correct - flight planning, crew is managed by Sabre FPM and Crew Manager (afaik). ACARS are managed through FPM , HERMES and some strange interface for the old mainframes (the rest of the comm is going through this). The rest is mostly SAAS, but in the RDP sense. I can assure you, its definitely not "Cloud", but Remote Desktop Computing. SAS also has multiple small airlines (local) attached to it, some of them are using their own stuff, but most of it is central.

This is by far one of the most stale industries as yarper mentioned. Really long sales cycles heavily relying on connections and also large implementation/customization fees are part of it. Esp. in flight planning - where 0.1% fuel savings are important, things haven't moved anywhere.

Interesting. I worked on the support team for the software that creates and files the flightplans for UAL. It was a horrible piece of SW/architecture with many outages. We tested in production daily and had direct access to the databases. I'm pretty sure they never changed their policies.. So yeah, this sounds very much like it!

Edit: Just got confirmation, this software was the root cause. No hacks/whatsoever!