
British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures - chris_overseas
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49261497
======
mk_chan
I 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.

~~~
magduf
Remember, this is the same airline that just placed a huge order for Boeing
777MAX airplanes. It's obviously run by incompetents, so I'd stay far away.

~~~
joncrane
What's wrong with the 777 Max planes?

~~~
visarga
He meant 737 Max (order was about 200 jets).

[https://simpleflying.com/british-
airways-737-max/](https://simpleflying.com/british-airways-737-max/)

------
lazyjeff
I'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
If 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.

~~~
mikelward
Were you able to get them to reimburse you for the rental car?

~~~
drewg123
No, but I felt lucky that the refunded the fare for the flight that I didn't
take.

------
londons_explore
A 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
In 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
Not 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.

~~~
mgkimsal
> since Lockerbie they’ll offload your bags if you’re not on the flight.

Not in the US...

Even back in the 90s - just a few years after Lockerbie - we had some UK
guests staying with us. We flew from Detroit to Vegas for a few days. They're
luggage got put on a different plane, and ended up in LA. They were horrified
and couldn't figure out why their luggage was on a flight they weren't on.

Doesn't seem to be a big concern in the US, as I've had my own luggage get on
wrong flights at least twice in the past 5 years, and I don't actually fly all
that much (2-3 flights a year max).

~~~
viraptor
You're mixing a mistake (luggage redirected) with a specific situation
(missing passenger). Mistakes happen. But known abandoned luggage will be
offloaded.

------
robk
These 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
USAF 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.

------
Havoc
As 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
You must have been very lucky. BA under its current ex-Vueling CEO is twice
the price of EasyJet for half of the service.

------
IntegralCalcs
There 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
There 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
Yes I meant more with government regulations, and as someone else mentioned
having a backup plan for when there are technical difficulties.

~~~
tialaramex
The 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
I wonder, has BA (or any other airline) or the UK government said what the
rules for this will be after Brexit?

I have a hard time imagining, say, EasyJet doing any sort of compensation they
aren't required by law to do.

~~~
isostatic
BA are more penny pinching than Easyjet.

As with all things brexit, the goal is to remove our rights

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/flight-delay-
compens...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/flight-delay-compensation-
eu261-brexit/)

------
mothsonasloth
[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 :(

~~~
dustinmoris
Minor nitpick, the language is called Malayalam, not "Malalayam". It's easy to
remember, because it is the only language in the world which reads the same
from back to front ;)

> 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.

I had the same experience with outsourced work to India. Like every place,
they have many "rockstar" developers, but these guys do not stay in the same
company for too long, an even if they do they don't stay in the same hands-on
job for too long and as soon as they move up they will not code anymore
themselves, because it is below their pay grade. In India particularly
hierarchy plays a huge part in culture and once someone is at a level where
coding is seen as "too low" there is nothing you can do to get them continue
their job. A company I once worked for even offered a pay rise to their Indian
rockstar devs, but wanted them to keep coding and they rather refused the pay
rise than doing the "low" work again.

> 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.

Same experience.

I think it's better to hire developers directly and employ them rather than
hire developers through a big agency. You won't avoid the staff turnover
overall, but it will happen at a much slower frequency.

~~~
Gpetrium
There are two main reasons to outsource: reduce cost & focus on core business.
By outsourcing a developer position, a company may not have to be engaged in
most of the process of hiring someone else in that geography (It has a cost),
there is also the inherit admin cost associated with maintaining the pipeline
of developers to cover for the high turn-over, the need of finance/HR/ops
professionals, etc from that geography.

In essence, unless a company intends to have major offices in the region and
that it may be interested in becoming an outsourcing agency in the future, it
may not make sense business wise.

------
kenneth
I 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
_Seems 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.

------
isostatic
That'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.

------
warrenmiller
fixed now

------
trilila
Seems 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?

~~~
14113
Speaking 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.

~~~
t0mas88
As a pilot, I'm really sorry about the state of infrastructure at the
destinations, but we need fax or phone sometimes.

For context: Imagine a crew room, with an old yellow looking windows 95
machine as the only "IT service" and only GSM-speed (or no reception at all)
mobile internet in the area. The machine doesn't really work, or is on a
dialup connection (yes this still exists).

These are the cases where we use the phone, or write the plan manually on a
form and fax that. The phone has a high risk of mistakes, because you're
reading lots of numbers and codes so it's easy to misunderstand one.

~~~
14113
That's a much more reasonable explanation - thanks, I appreciate it! The way
I'd had it explained to me was more along the lines of "greedy pilots want to
be able to fax because they can't be bothered to learn how to use email", but
your explanation makes a lot more sense.

------
ptah
can they not just transfer passengers to other airlines

~~~
acchow
How would they do that without working computers?

~~~
ptah
the other airlines computers are working. they would have to book them in
manually

~~~
londons_explore
Anything 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.

