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British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures
- ptah 7y agocan they not just transfer passengers to other airlines
- acchow 7y agoHow would they do that without working computers?
- ptah 7y agothe other airlines computers are working. they would have to book them in manually
- londons_explore 7y agoAnything involving automated systems failing like this leaves not enough human employees to do all the work of the computers. The only solution is to drop work that's less important. In this case, that should have been ticketing/seat allocation/baggage handling. They should have simply allowed anyone into the planes, and dealt with reconciling records of who flew and who paid later.
- chillydawg 7y agoIt's quite likely there's not enough capacity to move this many passengers over.
- isostatic 7y agoBA operate more than half the flights out of Heathrow, and airlines run load averages well above 90%. There just aren't the planes.
- CaptainZapp 7y agoThey hate paying for that. After their last major IT shitshow they didn't even inform passengers of their rights to compensation. Only when the authorities rapped hard on their nuckles the feebly mentioned something.
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoOr transfer the plane and crew (and slot) to another airline? "Your flight is now operated by RyanAir on the original schedule. Expect an adjustment of price via the original method of payment". Or United.
- mk_chan 7y agoI was stuck in exactly this situation with my father last year going from UK to Portugal via Heathrow. Hundreds of people past immigration counters joined the lines to get back into the country, stuck in there for about 5 hours in an extremely congested, slow moving crowd. Some of the younger people were so outraged they took to Twitter and Instagram and began a campaign to refund and sue. About 3 hours in, BA decided it might be prudent to provide water bottles and a pack of biscuits to their customers. It was a pretty grueling experience TBH. An exact repeat of this situation makes it seem like such failures are becoming routine for BA.
- bostik 7y agoWe were scheduled to fly from Edinburgh to London last year, when the previous meltdown happened. Luckily we got notified well before anyone got to the airport and managed to book train tickets instead.
- ptah 7y agodid you get compensated?
- darkhorn 7y agoBecause he was in EU he has right for compansation.
- robin_reala 7y agoSpecifically, €400 per person assuming they were flying to Lisbon: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-rights/air/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right... . If OP hasn’t claimed already, then it’d probably be a good idea to do that before October 31st though.
- isostatic 7y agoBA are required to inform them of the compensation they're entitled to (and provide duty of care)
- 7y ago
- londons_explore 7y agoA failure of IT systems shouldn't stop the plane flying... The gate staff should just let anyone onboard with a legit ticket or a sufficient story about buying one. Sure, some people might get a free ride, or a few legit ticket holders can't get on because the plane is full, but overall, most passengers end up happy. Simple things like "the pilot can't log in to the HR system so he gets paid for the flight" should be fixed with a combination of process changes and "let's just fly now, make paper records, and fix the computer records later" Communication systems should have a backup of a large box of walkie-talkies in every airport so that, for example, the baggage staff can radio to the pilot to let him know they are done loading.
- abraae 7y agoIn yesterday's world, yeah. Today, when you have to take off your shoes to get onto a plane in the US, I don't see that happening.
- tolien 7y agoNot even in recent times; since Lockerbie they’ll offload your bags if you’re not on the flight. If BA put aircraft in the air without any idea who was on them, they’d be rapidly forced to land again with the threat of being shot down.
- jon-v 7y agoBut you don't actually need IT systems to record who is on the flight - all you need is a pre-printed list of legit passengers and a pen.
- tolien 7y agoYeah - the GGP is talking about just letting anyone go though: > let anyone onboard with […] sufficient story about buying one > some people might get a free ride As dagw’s comment points out they’re using the pen and paper approach; however, it takes longer and missed slots/out of place crews can cascade catastrophically.
- IntegralCalcs 7y agoThere should be guidelines as to how airlines should address tech problems and flight delays, so people don't end up on the ground for hours, sometimes without access to food or water.
- isostatic 7y agoThere are 1. Where reference is made to this Article, passengers shall be offered free of charge: (a) meals and refreshments in a reasonable relation to the waiting time; (b) hotel accommodation in cases where a stay of one or more nights becomes necessary, or where a stay additional to that intended by the passenger becomes necessary; (c) transport between the airport and place of accommodation(hotel or other). 2.In addition, passengers shall be offered free of charge two telephone calls, telex or fax messages, or e-mails. 3.In applying this Article, the operating air carrier shall pay particular attention to the needs of persons with reduced mobility and any persons accompanying them, as well as to the needs of unaccompanied children. Personally I love my right to a telex.
- IntegralCalcs 7y agoYes I meant more with government regulations, and as someone else mentioned having a backup plan for when there are technical difficulties.
- tialaramex 7y agoThe thing you're responding to _is_ a government regulation. Specifically the EU's regulation 261/2004. The EU has both Regulations (like this) and Directives. A Directive says that member governments need to make a law that achieves something, but leaves it to them to figure out the details. A Regulation (like 261/2004) doesn't leave it to national government, it's the same across the entire EU. BA were required (as a condition of operating an airline anywhere in the EU) to obey these regulations.
- biztos 7y ago
- Havoc 7y agoAs much as I like flying BA as a in person experience - Their IT is a shitshow of note. Even on a good day it’s 50/50 whether it can find my bookings.
- goatinaboat 7y agoYou must have been very lucky. BA under its current ex-Vueling CEO is twice the price of EasyJet for half of the service.
- trilila 7y agoSeems like software failures are a common occurrence in british banks and airports. Perhaps a culture of corner cutting, and calling it agile, might be the cause?
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoOr a culture of outsourcing.
- isostatic 7y agoOutsourcing to the lowest bidder
- utouq 7y ago[indian flag emoji]
- bitbatbangboo 7y agocries in InfoSys
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 14113 7y agoSpeaking as someone who (for a time) worked in the IT department of British Airways, the culprit is really just ancient systems that aren't well maintained, along with institutional and industrial pressure not to improve them or upgrade them. For example, I worked as part of the team that managed the software that allowed pilots to submit flight plans. Any upgrades had to go through multiple weeks of reviews and testing (I don't mean code review - I mean reviews through managers and processes), and was run on some rather ancient hardware. Moreover, thanks to pressure from the pilots union, the system had to be able to accept flight plans by fax, so had a lot of legacy cruft to support that too. The problem isn't agility, corner cutting or moving too fast - it's moving too slow.
- isostatic 7y agoThat'll be expensive. Between €250 and €600 for everyone affected -- 90 cancellations of say 150 people and you're looking at the €5 million range, beore you even consider any delays.
- lazyjeff 7y agoI'm stuck in London right now trying to get to Athens on British Airways because of this IT failure. I went to a gate of an earlier flight where they had opened up a couple of seats, and the gate agents were trying to get me on, but the computer system didn't let them do it and they had to let the flight leave. It's interesting to see the breakdown of automation. Lines are long yes, but they also don't move because everyone's situation takes half an hour to explain and lots of manual labor to resolve. There's sort of this competitive mentality (leading to frustration) because there are some alternate options (like flights on competing airlines) but every time you refresh, the options dwindle and you can't do anything about it without an agent. They also have run out of hotel vouchers and hotels at the airport are full. They've started processing people by just writing down our concerns and giving us a pager to reduce the length of the line. I think a lot of this could be resolved with a better auto-booking and notification system. Like n interface that lets you enter in your constraints, and it optimizes for you better than a person can do by hand.
- drewg123 7y agoIf your time is at all valuable to you, I strongly advise not depending on the airline for anything. Book your own hotel immediately; don't wait for a voucher. Arrange your own transport to your destination; don't wait in an hours long line. You may be able to get compensation later, but the important thing is you'll have a place to sleep and arrive at your destination long before you otherwise would. Case in point.. a few weeks ago, I was flying Delta from their hub in ATL to my home city, about 300 miles away. There were flight cancellations due to severe weather all evening. The lines to speak to agents were almost as long as the entire terminal. Lines were 20-30 people long even in the Skyclub. My 9pm flight kept getting delayed, and delayed, and delayed. It was finally cancelled at 12:30a just as I was about to board. Rather than wait in a line for a hotel voucher, I brought up my Marriott app and booked something myself. When I got to my hotel, I saw that Delta had auto-rebooked me on a flight leaving the next night. So I rented a car from a suburban Hertz location (all the cars at the airport were gone). In line at the rental car place the next morning, I talked to several people whose flights were cancelled. By the time they'd waited in the lines, all the hotel rooms were gone and they had slept on the floor at the airport. I arrived home around 5pm, 3 hours before the rebooked flight was scheduled to leave (and yes, it was delayed). Delta refunded me for that leg of the trip, which just about covered the rental car.
- mothsonasloth 7y ago[Controversial post] This is what happens when you treat "IT" as a cost centre and outsource it to India with TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Accenture etc. In the case of BA; its Tata Consultancy Service (TCS). I can't comment on outsourcing to Phillipines, Ukraine or Malaysia. I've worked with two companies that did their outsourcing to India and it was a shitshow. First and foremost there is the cultural barrier, sure India is a very Anglicized country but it has so many localised languages (Malalayam, Telugu, Tamil etc.) and cultures that means communication between one IT centre in Bangalore is very different to one in Chennai or Pune. + Compounded with the fact that outsourcing companies distribute the work between IT centres in different regions, it can be hard communicating and organising work. Secondly, there are brilliant Devs/Testers/Analysts in India but they move around a lot because the pay is so terrible. Therefore a lot of undocumented knowledge gets lost which inevitably causes problems when doing maintenance or solving outages. One week you are working with a brilliant person, the next week they are gone. Thirdly, the sales people at many outsourcing companies are brilliant. They promise the world, then for the first three months keep the clients happy. Then there is always a slump in service / performance as the "dream team", the sales people use to wow the clients move onto the next company they are trying to woo. Fourthly, when the offshoring occurs, the transmission of knowledge sharing is very hard. The local people who are being let go won't be too facilitating in this documentation as well which is understandable. Finally, just the geographical aspect. Teleconferencing, skyping etc. really adds an overhead and slows down productivity. I'm going to finish with an anecdote, which makes you really appreciate the contrast. I was working on a project, reviewing code submitted by a dev from offshore. This was during monsoon season, a couple of days later I found out the person died in the monsoon due to a severe localised flooding in the place he was living just outside the city. I live in Scotland which is a wet place, but we don't have to worry about drowning or losing our homes to flooding in most cases :(
- test001only 7y agoI do agree with some of your points but looks like outsourcing industry is the favorite scapegoat these days for any failure. From other anecdotes in this comment section, various other reason are being thrown around for BA repeatedly having IT failure. So without any proper analysis it would be premature to conclude one way or the other.
- kenneth 7y agoI was stuck in LHR during the last time they had an identical system outage. I was lucky to be the very first person in line to check-in when the systems went down, so I was the first through when they fixed it 90min later. I had however missed my flight by then. Also, everyone was a lot more pleasant about it in the first wing vs. the mess in the general check-in hall. Seems these issues are not infrequent. BA and LHR need to get their shit together.
- alistairSH 7y agoSeems these issues are not infrequent. BA and LHR need to get their shit together. Not just LHR and BA. Most of the major US carriers have had similar catasrophic IT failures over the last few years. It's industry-wide.
- FearNotDaniel 7y agoI'm not sure you can blame LHR for this. Terminal 2 (Lufthansa/Star Alliance) never seems to suffer from this utter incompetence, it's only BA as far as I can see.
- robk 7y agoThese guys are poster children for outsourcing all their core IT functions far and wide. Seems to come back and bite them rather often now.
- kjhk345bnm 7y agoUSAF MS windows systems in the UK were playing up yesterday as well, everything working really really slowly, been trying to find out if its a windows update that borked something or if its something else.
- warrenmiller 7y agofixed now