Airlines have made great technological leaps in recent years, allowing passengers to check in from home or download boarding passes on their smartphones. But if you’ve ever been stranded at an airport during a raging thunderstorm, chances are you will end up standing in a long line watching a gate agent typing furiously on an outdated computer.

The airlines are still catching up with the technology many of their customers already carry in their pockets.

That’s a problem for an industry whose core purpose is customer service. Still, there is some hope for change.

The carriers are finally recognizing that many of their antiquated systems contribute to passenger frustrations. They have begun developing hand-held devices, a little bigger than cellphones, that have much quicker access to airline data and allow gate agents to assist passengers throughout the terminal.

In theory, gate agents with these devices can anticipate the need to rebook a flight after a missed connection, instead of waiting for passengers to ask. In the future, new technology may allow airlines to know if travelers are stuck in traffic on their way to the airport, thanks to GPS-enabled smartphones, or offer an earlier flight if a traveler shows up with time to spare.

Passengers traveling this summer will see only a glimpse of the new technology, though it will be introduced at airports over the next year or two. For now, the airlines remain dependent on computer systems first built a half century ago that have been layered with updates upon updates — “a spaghetti of networks,” as one analyst described it — that do not always communicate well with one another, or with passengers.

So some airport screens may say a flight is on time, while the gate information shows it has been moved to another terminal and the airline employees standing behind their monitors say the flight has, in fact, been delayed two hours.

That is why the airlines, including American Airlines and Continental Airlines, have started updating their systems.

At its major hubs, including Dallas-Fort Worth, American recently started using a technology called Yada — for “your assistance delivered anywhere” — that allows its agents to promptly rebook passengers on a different flight, advise on a gate change or track down a lost bag. Travelers do not have to wait in line anymore.

Yada also prints boarding passes using small printers that agents strap to their belts. Because the devices also read credit cards, American’s agents can check oversize carry-on bags and charge a bag fee directly at the boarding gate.

It seems simple enough. But modernizing the technology has been complicated, said Monte E. Ford, American’s chief information officer. “It’s like changing the engine of a plane in flight,” he said. “But we firmly believe that consumers will drive the technology, and we are trying to build an environment that will adapt to that.”

The airline industry was once a technology pioneer. It introduced computerized reservations in the 1960s, for instance. And airlines run complex systems to schedule flights, choreograph thousands of simultaneous operations, and carry millions of passengers every day.

But the technology was developed to first serve the airlines, not the passengers. (NYT)