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.
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.
Hwoever every 4-6 passengers they deny boarding is a €2000 fine.
For EU flights especially you still check passports at the gate - indeed it's the only place they are checked.
For other flights they normally check visas at the checkin desk, but if you're transferring you usually get visa checked at the gate. Most people have nice simple visas that pretty much anyone can check, a few troublemakers like me rely on more complex timatic rules (say TWOV in Beijing on multiple tickets), but no reason that can't be checked at gate either.
I believe they still check IDs at the gate, even for internal flights. (I am pretty sure they checked my ID the last time I did one) - It is not an passport check, just an ID check at the gate to match person to ticket (as the security in UK airport just check boarding passes, not IDs)
In most countries, there are severe penalties for airlines who allow passengers to reach destination immigration controls without valid documents, so if there's any doubt, airlines will not allow passengers to fly.
"BA said it is reverting to manual systems for check-in at airports."
The problem is that the manual process is slower and once a flight gets too delayed then it misses its slot and if too many flights get delayed it causes cascading problems since there aren't enough free later slots to put them in and you have to cancel.
> 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).
You're mixing a mistake (luggage redirected) with a specific situation (missing passenger). Mistakes happen. But known abandoned luggage will be offloaded.
Yeah - 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.
I have on multiple occasions been boarded by pen and paper in the US when technical issues prevented the electronic systems from being used - somehow airline/ground staff in the US often seem more empowered to do this sort of thing than their European counterparts.
That's insane - that'd never happen. There's no way they can take that security and immigration risk. I bet they can't even do that if they want to - I'm sure governments need to know all travellers precisely.
I flew out of Heathrow just the other week, and I'm pretty sure BA doesn't have enough staff to accept checked baggage and get it onto the right plane without any IT systems.
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 :(
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.
Everything you say is right and true for out-sourcing. However, I think the better point is that companies like this treat their IT platform as a cost center. They need to invest in that just as much as new planes and amenities for passengers. This is the consequence of not doing so and having 30 year old systems still in the critical path. They have all built a spectacular mountain of technical debt. This is largely true for banks and hospitals and many other industries.
I 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.
It doesn't specifically have to be outsourcing. Just the massive change associated with it. Take something mediocre, and try to run it somewhere else, and it's worse. Similar outcome to moving it across the country with a different set of "locals".
Agree to lot of your points. Insipite of all these risks, a lot of management teams find value with outsourcing. I guess they feel risks are every where around.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Legacy software and outsourcing to consultants or contractors. I think that's the story for most organisations in the UK - not willing to invest in having a dedicated team of in-house developers. Meanwhile developers are like nomads and are on the move to the better paid jobs and/or the better tech stack and better workloads. Lot of new graduates coming through but still not enough to meet demands in the market. Training is the biggest cost imo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An exact repeat of this situation makes it seem like such failures are becoming routine for BA.
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