Juan Monroy

For the fifty-ninth time, I flew between JFK and LAX, which I did for my nephew Alex’s second birthday.

Of those fifty-eight flights, all but four have been on United Airlines, and Thursday’s flight was the last I would fly through United’s now-retired reservation system Apollo. As of March 3, the new United switched to SHARES, Continental’s legacy system. Since I have a fascination with deprecated technology, it is interesting to see a long standing technology platform go by the wayside. But unlike most technologies, which either fail or fade into obscurity because they stop working, Apollo is being retired because of a corporate merger, and a merged airline needs only one reservations system.

The end of Apollo won’t mean the end of anything for my flying or anyone else’s, other than the backend computer system that processes flight reservations and other passenger services. However, it’s hard not to feel a bit nostalgic as it marks the end of an era.