Doug Parker has confirmed the current CIO Maya Liebman as a safe pair of hands for information technology for American Airlines for the new executive leadership team.

As if the World needed any confirmation of the fact that the airlines support New Distribution Capability (NDC) the CEOs have confirmed their support for the initiative at the 69th AGM.

T2RL has always believed that Google would not want to provide enterprise applications to airlines, whatever the level of commitment shown by the management at ITA. The press article quotes from the ITA website. It is interesting to note that this quote appears to have disappeared.

Amadeus has gone into live production with their new revenue accounting service with Saudia.

The furore over IATA 787 is one that would have fascinated George Orwell. The Travel Technology Association is the latest group to create a straw man and then try to burn it down. Any lawmaker that actually read resolution 787 (and it is only ten pages long) would dismiss this ridiculous posturing out of hand. IATA is not telling airlines how to sell or price their services. They already do that quite effectively. It is just doing its job of developing technical standards for the more efficient implementation of things that the airlines will do anyway.

Perhaps it's being so far from Head Office that allows Georg Reubensal, MD of Expedia New Zealand to take a rational view of IATA's NDC initiative.

If any confirmation were needed about the centrality of the PSS to an airline's operations yesterday's grounding of American Airlines provided it. Sabre was quick to take to Twitter to defend its systems which operated normally throughout. The problem was in the communications network that prevented AA.com or American's employees being able to access the Sabre in the first place. No doubt lessons will be learned and possibly heads will roll.

HP has announced an agreement with Travelsky to support the development of its new generation PSS, "Compass". Following the failure of AA's Jetstream project, HP appears to have been given a second chance at building a new generation system with Travelsky.

The acquisition by Amadeus of a major product line from Turkish company Hitit marks a significant departure for both companies. And it may significantly influence the battle to supply PSS to Turkish Airlines.

IATA has adopted a standard for its New Distribution Capacity. This will allow airlines to market their services as effectively in indirect channels as they already do in their web sites and call centres. Always assuming that ill-informed controversy whipped up by the likes of the Business Travel Consortium is not allowed to derail a much needed modernisation.

The first major PSS migration of the year has taken place and it went off apparently without a hitch. Etihad is now a user of the SabreSonic suite and the market for airline passenger services systems has been demonstrated to be a rational and competitive one.

With Google not yet established in airline search the owners of Kayak have exploited an opportunity to maximise their returns.

The North American carriers will be hard pressed to find a commercial proposition from the market that meets their current low costs and rates for PSS. To sustain their economics they will have to look at new models and agreements. One of these models might resemble Air France, Lufthansa, SAS and Iberia's creation of Amadeus in 1986. Open Source may be another model for consideration. Whatever route they choose the prize might be more than maintaining PSS economics.

Amadeus has introduced another new product line. Revenue Accounts is a natural extension to its existing PSS and Revenue Management applications. It is also the second most valuable application in most airlines' portfolio and as such offers long-term revenue opportunities.

British Airways and Starwood Hotels have both drawn criticism for their attempts to embellish customer data with research in non-related areas. Privacy and data security are among the hottest topics for debate in the online world of 2012. It is unlikely that BA and Starwood will be the last to attract controversy.

Airline technology is often characterised as living in the past. The struggle the Internet community has had to implement IPV6 shows that the problems are far from unique to a single industry.