EuroFlyer at LGW, CityFlyer at LCY. Companies both being run by the same MD and Finance manager. The plot thickens ;)

During the current 4 week period of A380s being used to/from Frankfurt... are there any normal passengers on these aircraft ? I don't think I've ever seen such a huge number of people so keen on doing a guided tour of an aircraft cabin while flying... nor flight deck and cabin crew with such enthusiasm for their job and so willing to make avgeeks happy

Probably all got their own vlogs too...

It's old news really..they did it also when the 380 first came in to service in 2013...the aircraft also flew to FRA and MAD ..and it was fun times and the crew generally excited. Changed days eh ..
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....c71058c4ce.jpg

I am seeing reports that BA cutting a couple of thousand rotations from now till March.

I guess all those cancellations etc can once again only be expected. It's not really returning to normal flying is it yet and I suspect that it will not for a while. A lot of the fun of it is now a distant memory for many.

I hope that some of those rotations will now get reinstated.
On another point, I should like to pass on strong thanks for a check in desk agent at T5. I have looked through the website but cannot find the link.

Thanks DRUK,

Load Control Problems 220202
 

BA network seized up this AM, manual load sheets according to the Captain of the delayed flight I was on this morning. Looking at FR24 delay seemed to be fairly endemic through the network, who forgot to feed the hamster?

was today not 20 years ago… #title

They have had a terrible few days. Huge baggage backlog, lots of short haul cancellations, their website all went down this morning and there were the issues you describe.

Willie Walsh and Alex Crux’s cuts are coming back to bite them. Not enough staff, poor IT infrastructure and lots of fed up passengers. The thread on a frequent flier forum about this is very enlightening about the state BA find themselves in.

BA long ago failed to realise that - without tip top IT - they are nothing. Like thousands of companies they saw it as a utility. Noawdays, a true 21st century company is one that STARTS with IT and then looks for what it is going to sell. The obvious example is a certain online retailer named after a river. An airline is an IT company that happens to sell seats on aircraft. Everything has to focus on getting those seats full and off the ground. I have consisently seen BA computer and IT network failures over the last years. I recall one big one where Cruz willingly told the news cameras that they would find out what went wrong and tell the shareholders and passengers. Of course that never happened as they had overseen the cuts that made the mistakes.

It's a C Suite decision and they made the wrong call for short term shareholder value (greed). IT was simply seen as just another cost, and "cost cutting is in our DNA" BA just wasn't going to invest. Having seen many businesses leap from ancient data centres to cloud managed services, I knew BA were dinosaurs and it's long past time this stuff breaks. My current employer is the same, our current migration is 10 times more painful as it's decades late.

The problem for the average CIO, is that it typically takes a few years and a lot of money to migrate the company off a bunch of legacy systems. If those systems are absolutely critical to the company (and these exist at all firms), the migration had better be perfect... or the CIO gets pushed under the bus when problems occur and customers complain. Furthermore, after the passage of a few years, at least a few of the C board members will likely have moved jobs or retired... so the benefit of the capex spend is not seen under their watch. The annual accounts don't really show investment in IT, and most investors will have sold and be long gone by the time a new IT system comes online.

Unless the CEO begs the CIO to migrate to a new system... it's literally more than the CIO's job's worth to do anything more than tinkering.
I write this as someone who knows a lot about Amazon's cloud product (AWS), but regret how depressing it really all is...

BA's IT infrastructure will improve significantly only if Luis Gallego (no, not Sean Doyle) wants it to improve

It shouldn't be that different from investing in new cabins or aircraft. A decision was made to allow the hard product in the remaining B767s to become dinosaurs in market and eventually invest in new A320NEOs which are comparably more modern and way less comfortable. The investment decision was a medium term one.
Despatch reliability is an operational need, as is systems reliability. It's all about management buy-in, some leaders get it, some don't. The ones who don't just store up all the pain until it breaks and the next guy has a world of problems. Just like Boeing using the GE model to maximise short term shareholder value over putting the longer term interests of the business on a sound footing. One day the ball gets dropped and you get the Nightmareliner, Frankentanker and the MAX crashes.
Real leaders see IT as a BAU necessity and aren't afraid to get it right. Putting the pain off just make the cumulative agony worse.

It is of course possible that the BA bean-counters have got it right (from their, and the shareholders, point of view).

As noted above, the cost of a radical overhaul of BA's IT infrastructure is likely to be astronomical, and probably at least a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the cost and pain of a fair number of days of disruption.

It makes no difference to BA how many upset passengers swear never to use the airline again, unless it starts to make a big impact on the bottom line.

It's hardly a unique industry though. Can not a lot of it be bought off the shelf?

You can get specialist assistance to migrate from one data platform to another, it gets tricky when you have multiple older platforms running in ways which are business critical and so there's a high risk of disruption in any move. With legacy IT over decades it's a nightmare of different coding and operating systems.

I think we both know it does. As I said above, it HAS to happen, they just need to decide when. The status quo is not a credible option, support will stop and end of life approaches, so the question is how and when they fix it, not if.
Remember that pension scheme deficit that they ignored for years? Well that didn't end well either, same principle. Accenture Alex got his bonus on cost cutting short termism which leaves Sean Doyle an even harder job medium term.

That depends whether you mean it does make no difference, or it doesn't make no difference. :O

"it gets tricky when you have multiple older platforms running in ways which are business critical and so there's a high risk of disruption in any move. With legacy IT over decades it's a nightmare of different coding and operating systems."

Mrs A manged the transfer of a vast set of data bases etc from a household name in the UK to the USA 10+ years ago . It was a nightmare - every time they started the move (which had to be done over long weekends as it was active in normal business hours) they found another "legacy" - some dating back to the late 1950's - chugging away below layers of new code. Planned at 3 months, actually took 30. One issue was identifying all the various data base entries for the same person under filed under different codes - Asturias56, 56ASturias, Snr Asturias, Mr & Mrs Asturias - and that's before you get to addresses and then different products and accounts.........

Shouldn't this be an IAG project, or would that make it even worse?

Changing the scope of an IT migration from just BA to all of IAG makes the task significantly harder, but in the long term is the right thing to do - the CEO will likely salivate over all the potential long term "synergies" that can be achieved (job cuts to you and me)
That said, France and Germany are raising the question with the EU about BA being a non-EU carrier and what IAG should do about it - this is a strategic question of much greater urgency to a CEO than IT system re-engineering

I remember reading somewhere that a surprising proportion of worldwide IT expenditure (can't recall the exact %) is spent on migration projects.

A good friend of mine is a senior manager of software developers and support staff. About five years ago, a small company recruited him to migrate them from legacy systems to bring them up to date, After two years of struggling to get them to agree to what was needed - they still clung to the old systems. There was proof that they could save money and do much better on the small things that did migrate. Eventually, he realised they were not going to bite the bullet and left for another company. His pals have had similar experiences.

In the mid-1990s, when I was in telecommunications, I was working a contract for a large and well known UK high street company. The IT Director reported to the CEO which was good as we thought they took us seriously. Then the CIO was told to report to the finance director - who reported to the CEO. Effectively, demoting the whole IT department becuase the CEO thought that IT was all about money. What we did was ensure that every item was tracked from manufacture overseas through to ownership and guarantees.

In my view, most managers just do not understand IT and, therefore they ignore it. Hoping that the problem will errupt on the next man (it's always a man) who takes the hot seat.

Russia flight ban
 

With BA now banned from Russian airspace, how will they route to Beijing, Tokyo etc?

at the moment they don’t fly to Beijing or Seoul. Tokyo route is cancelled and I guess passengers can go on the JAL flight which has a BA codeshare.

It's happened again, app and website down, aircraft stuck on stand, global IT breakdown at BA. The whole operation will now slowly grind to a halt.
Again

Russian cyber attack?

What if it is NOT a coincidence, it could well be a cyber attack this time.

Russia wouldn’t need to bother. It’s an open fact that BA’s IT goes down on at least a weekly basis at the moment.

That’s not a fact though is it? BA have had a few IT issues recently, but the IT going down at least on a weekly basis. Sounds dramatic, but hardly credible as a statement.

check out Flyertalk. There are threads there on it. It went down on Tuesday and at least there were reports the week before of the website not working for a period and the week before that. If you prefer I’ll say it at least has had monthly issues with its IT either website going down, app not working or the Fly system going down.

There are definitely glitches on Avios. If you press search again you get combinations of your previous destination or previous dates.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60533275
"It is understood the system issues are not a result of any cyber attack."
All A320-family flights out of LHR between 6am and 11:59am cancelled.. 85 round trip flights all with EU261 liability

That number sounds a bit high - there are usually about 50-55 such departures pre-midday on a Saturday.

When are BAW ever going to get a grip of their antiquated IT systems?

Not just departures, it looks like inbounds are being cancelled too. Nightstoppers, including those at BCN, FCO, ZRH and PRG, all appear to be stranded at those airports.

I dont think Fly ever worked since the got rid of PRS. It was an old system but seemed stable.

I thought Britain had left the EU?

The legislation remains in place until revoked and/or replaced.