I'm impressed with the BA staff that 400 people have volunteered to help sort things out today. If my management had mucked things up so badly as BA's has I'm not sure I'd be rushing to save their skins/bonuses.
It's quite telling though that four days on, BA management still seem to be blaming the complexities of the baggage system for the continuing delays; at the end of the day it's baggage, how hard can it be to learn? Note - I'm not intending to say there that the baggage handlers are stupid - what I mean is how insanely complex have they made this baggage system, for something which, really, is quite a simple concept - place labelled bags in the right box - even if there are several hundred boxes. After all thousands of airports all over the world mostly manage to do it every single day, including at airport terminals which are way busier than T5 currently is. Why do seemingly hundreds of baggage handlers need to "log on" to the baggage system anyway? I'd love to know what that's all about. Basically it seems to me that if the baggage system is so complicated that it takes 4+ days for everyone to learn it then they probably should have just spent the same money on a small army of people to staff a large room the length of the terminal and manually carry/trolley bags from piles on the "check in" side to piles on the "planes" side. And the arrivals baggage should be even easier - carry by hand or truck/trolley from "planes" side to an appropriately selected passenger pickup belt.
Anyway for all my criticism of BA(A) the last few days I think we should cut them some slack from tomorrow. It's clear that the idiot executives still aren't planning to fall on their swords despite their ridiculous performances like running away from the press, so no point in going on about it. The company staff as a whole seems to be trying to recover and get the terminal working so I think it is time to see if they can do it. If it's all still broken next weekend then we can point and laugh at the terminal building as clearly being unfit for purpose.
As for the people on TV etc saying "I'm never travelling BA ever again!!" I think, for most of the ordinary "consumer" customer paying for their own tickets they'll stick to their self-imposed exile until BA's next big flight sale. The business customers are going to be incredibly hard to tempt back though - they just can't be risking arriving without their business luggage/equipment or arriving late for meetings. Whether BA can survive without so many business customers and the entire business relegated back to the "Go" model it'll be interesting to watch.
What I'd like to know is if BAA are brave enough to put the fingerprint thing back on the agenda or is that well and truly buried now!
Last edited by derekvader; 30th Mar 2008 at 17:36.