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Originally Posted by Airbubba
(Post 9784641)
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Originally Posted by crewmeal
(Post 9785251)
This could be his "Piece de resistance"
"But Alex Cruz, the airline’s chairman, said that after a “rough start”, passengers now welcomed the opportunity to pay for M&S snacks on European short haul flights.He told the Sunday Times: It's going great. Customers say to us: 'Finally, I have good choices. No more chicken or beef'.". BA also always comment only about the food, whereas the key thing most appreciated on short haul was a refreshing drink. And even for food, having a choice of chicken or beef had long been in their dreams, having to put up with the "birdseed". The drinks had become the only reasonable bit. |
Media reports are that BA managers are as rare as hen's teeth on the ground at Heathrow, lack of information and according to Sky the police as involved that they a preventing people using bag drop.
BA is slowly but surely going down the tubes and this debacle will only accelerate the fall. |
Alex Cruz, if you are reading this, then get off of PRUNE and sort this mess out!
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Is the IT problem really fixed? I say this by asking people to look at BA.com.
Firstly the site is very flaky and frequently shows error code 404 server not responding Secondly look at LHR dept for today, shocking number of canx but several flts are showed as canx and in the next line flt dept with a time. Clearly there are no w/x problems they have plenty of parked a/c according to the TV so it can only be IT problems data lost who is on which a/c etc I fear what was once a proud British company is in terminal decline |
Originally Posted by air pig
(Post 9785324)
Media reports are that BA managers are as rare as hen's teeth on the ground at Heathrow, lack of information and according to Sky the police as involved that they a preventing people using bag drop.
BA is slowly but surely going down the tubes and this debacle will only accelerate the fall. |
Computer Weekly going for upgrade problem:
Upgrade error hits BA flights And a more detailed suggestion/error-guess of one possibility https://www.lola.tech/articles/why-d...wntime-13.html short form: - Departure Control System called Altea recently installed - Many big updates roll out a month after launch - The downtime started early Tuesday morning– Developers almost always choose early Tuesday mornings to push update. Everyone’s asleep or at work, so it helps minimize disruption. If in anyway true the managements mention of power-failure seems :eek: |
Originally Posted by mrben09
(Post 9785157)
As both SLF (derogatory as that title is) and a highly experienced IT leader (biased towards Infrastructure) and someone who spent nearly 10 hours yesterday in T5 , I feel I have something to contribute.
First off, let's not confuse DR with BCP, although both failed yesterday. For example while IT wherever were toiling over bringing systems back online , the CW/CE/First queues, that were right out of the terminal, were being "organised" by 2 women who were effectively herding cats. They were on a hiding to nothing as people were joining any one and then losing it when the staff come back round again 20 minutes later telling them to go and join the mega queue at WT. Not enough staff and definitely no sign of Managment at all. This got better during the afternoon, but still no sign of any Senior Staff at all. Even this morning they were trying to get us on a flight as my wife received a text to say it was cancelled but nothing showed on their system. Where were the managers, nowhere to be seen, as they "were in meetings". Maybe those meetings should have been through the night so everyone could be briefed for 0430. On a more serious note we were told by staff they couldn't find any megaphones to replace the non working PA. I would suggest that these should be easy to find in case of a real emergency. As for IT, outsourcing is not something I would advocate, but when it has crossed my path, I would never allow a system to go live without: Rigorous functional testing of system Rigorous DR Testing Sign off of all infrastructure designs from someone qualified to do so and counter sign it myself. The outsourcer should not have unrestricted responsibility for design of something thousands of miles away that isn't theirs. This also makes it easy to swap supplier should they prove to be sub par, which they will. I guarantee someone within BA has signed that design off as suitable, and that's where heads should roll initially. Then look at your "partner" Also all the previous posts regarding bean counters are a given as well. Scourge of IT ! On a personal note I'm not actually buying the power excuse but as we don't like to speculate within these halls I'll keep my opinion to myself. I will say however all the systems affected were internet facing. Anyway, got all that off my chest, and resigned to go back to work on Tuesday instead of enjoying a few cold ones on the Greek coastline ! Software issue ? In my experience, you test and test and test prior to an upgrade, then push out the software upgrade at the least crucial time of day. Then if it all goes horribly wrong, you roll back the release to the previous version (prior to the upgrade). Although this failure means you might not have tested everything sufficiently, you only have a short glitch and everything should be back up running again soon. The worst part is knowing that you have to test the whole shooting match again to find the needle in a haystack that caused the initial problem. |
This was last published in March 2001
The CW article refers to a long-ago change. The more recent upgrade was some time last year, I believe. |
Originally Posted by HHornet
(Post 9785382)
,,, Power supply issue - surely not :rolleyes:.
Software issue ? In my experience, you test and test and test prior to an upgrade, then push out the software upgrade at the least crucial time of day. Then if it all goes horribly wrong, you roll back the release to the previous version (prior to the upgrade). Although this failure means you might not have tested everything sufficiently, you only have a short glitch and everything should be back up running again soon. The worst part is knowing that you have to test the whole shooting match again to find the needle in a haystack that caused the initial problem. |
I know it is not the done thing to mention this place on PPrune but at the heart of the BA fiasco and the no food and the shrinking leg room is
Bad Flight Experience, BLAME Wall Street - Airliners.net |
Wow! Investors want decent returns!!! Shock Horror.......... I'm amazed anyone invests in the airlines - they are about par with Football teams and luxury yachts as a great way to lose your shirt..................
Once the tax payer woke up and the various subsidies (legal & illegal) started to be cut the airlines HAVE to attract investors - and that has led them down the path of LCA's and cuts in the legacy carriers. Personally I regret the effect - but people can now travel further and cheaper than ever before |
Yes, OK, blame the shareholders for demanding short-term profits......but it isn't as simple as that. The shareholders in the frame are the executives whose over-generous, excessive remuneration packages include shares, so they are the share-holders who are sacrificing their company to make a quick few million bucks. Other shareholders, ie pension funds, financial funds and so on, and of course private investors, do not, on the whole, demand short term profits; they are in it for the long run.
I was recruited into BOAC to join an Associate Company and for years felt a huge sense of pride at belonging to that family, regarded world-wide as the acme of excellence. As I have watched BA descend into being a foreign-owned carrier with an unfairly dominant position at LHR, whose standards of operations, customer service and maintenance have been for some time on a par with third-world failures, I am ashamed that it still has the gall to drag us in Great Britain down by calling itself "British", as though it were our national airline. I would like to think that there is a legal bar to false descriptions like that. This latest fiasco with their IT will prove, I hope, the final nail in the coffin. I hear that the official root cause is a "power failure". Words fail me; if that is true (who knows?) it shows staggering management incompetence. What would BA say if Heathrow were to shut down because of a "power failure"? No-break alternative supplies have been commonplace in any organisation that depends on its power for decades, including most of the airports that BA uses. So I'm not impressed by a Spanish gentleman wearing a hi-vis jacket to pretend he's at the heart of things telling me that's the reason for the failure. It's the reason he should have been shoved out of the door by now. Without the mega-payoff. Followed closely by that brand-destroyer from Ireland. |
I agree...........
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At the risk of being contrary, I think many, if not most, of the posts in this thread are a bit too dismissive of BA's IT procedures. While it is satisfying to chalk this :mad: to incompetence or cost-cutting, we don't know the answer yet. Just as airliner accidents now-a-days typically result from a confluence of multiple unexpected or untoward circumstances, so too do IT disasters.
I suspect that rather than being juvenile, BA's IT procedures are pretty advanced and very cognizant of the damage wrought by failures, with a lot of redundancy built in. Let's wait until the true facts become known. But I worry that there will be a substantial noncomparability between this IT incident and an airliner accident. The latter is investigated professionally by the AAIB, and the results made public, while who knows what transparency will exist with the former? |
HH
yes of course thats true but you cannot cut cut every year as well as improving revenues every year. But that what analysts and some investors demand-airlines are cyclical businesses if you don't understand that don't invest in them. In the early years of a companies life it is possible to have better profits year on year but that is unsustainable unless you look over a longer period of time and measure a companies performance over say 5-7 years . And yes airlines are businesses and there to make money for their stockholders but they also provide a vital service and if you keep paring away at that service you will end up not making a profit. But I come back to my point that instituitional shareholders and analysts are unrealistic and damaging in demanding more profit every year |
Originally Posted by Heathrow Harry
(Post 9785420)
Wow! Investors want decent returns!!! Shock Horror.......... I'm amazed anyone invests in the airlines - they are about par with Football teams and luxury yachts as a great way to lose your shirt..................
Once the tax payer woke up and the various subsidies (legal & illegal) started to be cut the airlines HAVE to attract investors - and that has led them down the path of LCA's and cuts in the legacy carriers. Personally I regret the effect - but people can now travel further and cheaper than ever before |
Originally Posted by SeenItAll
(Post 9785432)
I suspect that rather than being juvenile, BA's IT procedures are pretty advanced and very cognizant of the damage wrought by failures, with a lot of redundancy built in.
IT spending is bottom of the list as most management can't see the benefit of spending all that money on 1's and 0's. Until something like this happens. They obviously had b*gger all redundancy as a 'power failure' at a single site managed to completely nuke their worldwide operations. |
So, the original art of manual loadsheets, manual check-in, cabin crew actually physically counting SLF on board has died.
I do recall, not so many moons ago, actually practicing this exact scenario, not for BA fortunately, but another EGLL carrier. Yes, minor delays, some inconvenience but an effective proof the pencil and paper still has a very prominent place in today's modern technological era. Me, always one never to rely solely on IT, especially outsourced and someone who I cant shout at if it goes wrong..... |
I sometimes wonder how securely is a cost-cutting mentality "partitioned", so it never applies to aircraft maintenance?
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Originally Posted by slingsby
(Post 9785450)
So, the original art of manual loadsheets, manual check-in, cabin crew actually physically counting SLF on board has died.
I do recall, not so many moons ago, actually practicing this exact scenario, not for BA fortunately, but another EGLL carrier. Yes, minor delays, some inconvenience but an effective proof the pencil and paper still has a very prominent place in today's modern technological era. Me, always one never to rely solely on IT, especially outsourced and someone who I cant shout at if it goes wrong..... Whether we like it or not the systems have been set up to rely absolutely on the IT systems. While Cruz style management believe, like you, that IT is completely unimportant and can be outsourced to the cheapest bidder. This clash of attitudes was certain to lead to the failures we have seen at Delta, United and BA. Ideally, the board should have the CEOs of these companies meet their office content in cardboard boxes immediately after such a failure complete with total loss of all benefits and share options which should in any case be paid into escrow until an unsullied retirement. CEOs should have a list of events flagged with 'if this happens you are toast'; a system wide computer melt down is one of those instances. |
Originally Posted by SunnyUpHere
(Post 9785463)
I sometimes wonder how securely is a cost-cutting mentality "partitioned", so it never applies to aircraft maintenance?
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Originally Posted by Sonny_Jim
(Post 9785448)
I'm going to hazard a guess here and say that you don't work in IT.
IT spending is bottom of the list as most management can't see the benefit of spending all that money on 1's and 0's. Until something like this happens. They obviously had b*gger all redundancy as a 'power failure' at a single site managed to completely nuke their worldwide operations. |
Just to head off those who say that extreme cost cutting is "necessary" to compete with newer carriers (not necessarily LoCo) on fares, I will quote from the pricing for myself and a colleague for a round trip next week, in Y, at key business hours from London to Dublin. One on CityJet from London City, a "high cost" airport with a "high cost" BAe146/RJ, the other BA from Heathrow on a presumably more efficient A320. Exactly parallel flight times to rendezvous at destination, booked at the same moment.
CityJet ex LCY £280.91 BA ex LHR £454.50 I'm forgetting that Cityjet give me a snack and a drink. BA ? |
Changing the conversation slightly.
Working on rough estimates and best guesses, I reckon that this will cost BA more than €100,000,000 just via EU261. Unbelievable and some serious ass kicking needed! Having flown with a few long and short haul airlines recently I have to say BA don't score very highly in any category. Unlike some others I hope the survive, change and prosper! |
It was Maggie wot did it !
Whilst in no way surprising, it is still ever so slightly disappointing to see quite how many posters on here have no idea whatsoever of the company involved in this fiasco.
Yes I know it used to be called BOAC/ BEA, and IMPERIAL Airways before that but, to quote my friend Wiki: International Consolidated Airlines Group, S.A., often shortened to IAG, is a Spanish multinational airline holding company with its operational headquarters in London, England, United Kingdom and officially registered in Madrid, Spain. A glance at the current list of directors and an exceedingly superficial analysis thereof leads me to conclude tentatively of the nationalities of the current board: 5/12 Spanish (including Chairman) 1/12 French 1/12 Irish (CEO) 5/12 British though as the Frenchman is resident in Chelsea, we (sic) have the preponderance over the Spanish; morally if not quite numerically. Next AGM in Madrid (natch, see above) in mid June with live streaming online. Time to dig out those old shares ex-BA and hop on the AVE that morning for a jolly in New Castile? Which reminds me, when I came to live here, BA were the only company who couldn't put my new address on to their database. ¡ No matter how many times I reminded them ! And since IAG finally started paying a dividend about 18 months back, trying to get the pesetas into the bank has been a nightmare. |
Looking at the flts canx today plus huge delays on many flts that did get away I predict tomorrow will be fairly chaotic
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Have had some good flights and deals from BA in the past. Always respected BA for the service and also being the national carrier... in the past. BUT, after this and other (lesser?) fiascos I will never spend my monies on BA in the future. A lot of (so called) managers futures should be on the line now, especially at the top. Money is not everything, is BA a national carrier or not? Pride before a fall... or after a fall comes to mind, also how do they now get out of it. This has gone on for far too long.
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YAWN ...not my problem.....they have been on my NO FLY LIST for several years...and staying there .
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I occasionally fly BA (when my employer decides) and they certainly aren't the BA of old. Whilst the aircraft are still good, nonsense such as 9-seat rows in the 787 demonstrates a change of focus away from being the World's Favourite Airline. More importantly, you always recieved excellent service from BA staff, especially cabin crew. Now it is a bit of a lottery and there is certainly an air of apathy, visibly demonstrated by a lack of attention to detail and, dare I say it, less care about personal appearance.
Many will say that my observations are petty, insignificant and don't reflect the 'bottom line'. However, if your front-of-house staff aren't selling the brand then you have a major issue; staff demeanour is a really good indicator of the strength of a company. |
I note that the ba website states:
Please keep any food, transport or accommodation receipts and you can make a claim in due course through our Customer Relations teams. Commenting on the delays and cancellations affecting British Airways passengers, Matt Buffey, Head of Consumer Protection at the Civil Aviation Authority, said: "Passengers affected by the disruption to British Airways' flights are protected under EU law. The welfare of passengers must be the priority for any airline experiencing disruption and we fully expect all UK airlines to meet their obligations. Passengers who are currently caught up in this disruption should be informed of their legal rights by British Airways, but they can find out the full details of their rights during delays and cancellations by visiting the CAA website." Thus full compensation under EU law must be paid. |
Digging around and finding not much yet, except suggestions that it's problems with SIP (Service Integrated Platform) and that perhaps decisions taken around the time of the Iberia integration may be coming home to roost (or they would be, if they had managed to get their slots in the first place). I suspect axes may be grinding here but still, dig one must...
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Originally Posted by UV
(Post 9785555)
YAWN ...not my problem.....they have been on my No Fly List for several years...and staying there .
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Alex Cruz nearly caused the collapse of Vueling and now he is about to cause the collapse of BA.
...and in response to somebody asking why Alex Cruz was wearing a hi-viz inside during his interview on Sky News, it's because he wears it to bed as well. And in the shower too. |
Originally Posted by BEagle
(Post 9785558)
The CAA clearly ...
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Isn't BA's main data centre in Boudicea House near Hatton Cross, with an unmanned data centre in nearby Cranebank? If there was a failure of hardware or software in Boudicea House, I would have expected the operation to run from Cranebank. There is UPS in both buildings, so how could a power supply issue cause such massive failure.
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The power supply excuse doesn't quite sound credible for such a wide ranging series of failures.
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There has been some discussion about outsourcing. I recall that in 2008 I, along with several others, were kicked out of the IT department (known then as Information Management) for cost cutting reasons. One of the things we were told was that some of the four IT contractors would also be going.
Hang on, four? What about the hundreds of people from TCS and NIIT who were working in the department? Some had been at BA for a long time, one of them that I knew well had settled in the UK and bought a house. The answer was that they were not contractors, they provided a fixed price service. Oh, well, silly me for not recognising contractors when I see them. :ugh: |
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