Look guys, have a sense of proportion.
No company with an automated system is going to keep enough people on immediate standby to manually operate the system, even if is physically possible to do so (and don't forget the health a saftey jobsworths who will probably stop "untrained" staff doing the job). Clearly IT systems should have backups and there should be some redundancy but sometimes things do go wrong.
I have to strenuously disagree; if Fedex for example were unable to process the huge number of packages that they do 24 hrs a day at their processing centres, the company would be on their knees. Their business is to deliver passengers and baggage from one point on the globe to another, therefore BA and BAA should be capable of sufficient management foresight to consider the possibilities if IT is not working.