Do they do it themselves?

I thought they were on Amadeus/Altea?

They did FLY themselves when they needed to replace DCS and to avoid having to pay for AMADEUS. It is supported from India, not even joking. DCS used to be supported in-house. They have a back up called JFE that is clunky but ok for check in.

The system was down again as of 2 hours ago I hear.

Leave your coat on the hook. Absolutely spot on.

Banks are IT companies that happen to have a banking license.
Airlines are IT companies that happen to own expensive aluminium tubes.

When the failure of something shuts down your entire operation, it's clear that it's part of your core business. You don't outsource your core business. The CEOs are finally realising this, but it's taken them a while.

LC @ LGW I see..

Can you not do a manual L/S??

Thirty years ago, internally, it was pointed out to the management that other major corporate companies had, on their board, a Director for Computer Security
or as it was becoming to be call Business Continuity.
It was suggested that a major IT failure could doom the company.

Having sat accross the table from managers and watching as we proposed changes that would get everyone pulling together but that cost money via investment, I can attest that the usual reactions range from fear to glazed over boredom. Each department has an incentive to beat cost targets and so you have lots of individual silos and no common purpose. In my experience, corporate managers have ONE criteria for basing their decisions. "How will this help my personal prospects" The company does not matter as a whole entity.

This is an overhead of being in the airline business and should be appropriately resourced/managed, to provide an efficient and relaible service.

We're not talking about a corner shop, are we?

Disclaimer - SLF in airline IT

The thing is, it's the attitude that IT is an 'overhead' that is the issue.
You cost manage overheads.
You invest in core product.

The problems are not limited to IT (it's primarily a people cost), but to all the other areas that airlines nowadays consider overheads rather than assets - check-in staff, ground staff, air staff, pilots. Get good at what you do and bank some seniority and you are very much an overhead. Unless you're an accountant, it seems...

Disclaimer, strategist and executive education tutor in a business school here - I am surprised that you misdescribe an overhead and some other definitions.

Identifying IT as an overhead is not an attitude, it is a fact, it's an ongoing expense of running a business and that does not infer that critical infrastructure is not an asset. An IT system is certainly an asset and like most assets, needs maintaining by the allocation of resources, costing time and money. However, IT does not directly fly planes, serve passengers, load baggage so it is classed as overhead expenditure.

Check in staff, ground staff etc are not assets they are operating expenses directly linked to the product/service and create a capability that is either mandatory (a table stake) or a differentiator that provides market advantage.

The 'issue' (why don't we just call it for what it is, a problem?) is when executive management in a company doesn't understand where a capability such as IT fits in the value chain primary activities and then reduces expenditure in the support activities to the point where it becomes unfit for purpose and detracts from the value proposition.

I can indeed complete a manual Loadsheet. However, I don't work for BA!

I suspect the major issues were waiting for a Manual Check-in for so many flights simultaneously. It takes a long time to complete and pass the information to Load Comtrol or indeed the flight crew. Therefore flights get delayed or cancelled.

These days, the industry relies heavily on many IT systems to work effectively. Especially as staff levels are cut to the minimum to keep costs down.

I worked in telecommunications and IT for 27 years but never for an airline.

Many of these senior people wonder how it is that Amazon got to be so big so fast? They understood IT from day one.

In the UK we still have numerous companies that look down on IT. I recall doing a contract in the 1990s for a VERY well known UK plc and High Street name. They moved the IT director from his direct reporting postion to the MD, to reporting to the Financial Director. So, at a single stroke, they demoted the entire IT department and removed the MD's ability to understand the problems and opportunities.

THAT is the kind of old attitude that does real damage. But, you can be sure, no one will get the blame.

I do loadsheets for BA and no, Im not in Thailand. But we can not make only LS, we have to make everything for loading. That means loading instructions too. To make this we need cargo information and booked pax to plan ULDs. When this is done and aircraft is loaded we can not just make it simple. All uld numbers, pax, seating, fuel, aircraft weight, pantry, crew and without system it takes ages to get all this info. And you do not even know if station is able to provide this info. And now imagine you are supposed to this paperwork for flight each 10 minutes. Just all the phone calls will take the time. To make manual LS is possible in theory, not in real traffic. It would be possible but you would have to break all the rules. And my colleague got into trouble because he sent LS without 9 bags on A380. We can not miss a single kilogram.

I would hazard a guess that a contract with Amadeus or Sabre would probably cost a lot less than the disruption caused by in house failures so far this calendar year

And this is the problem.
IT does fly planes (try flying one without a flight plan), serve passengers (booking and check-in, APIS, seat assignment), load baggage (load sheets - guess which bit of BA broke in the latest failure).
Check-in staff that can efficiently load a plane, ground staff that can safely load it, are an asset without intangibles like goodwill. Customer satisfaction with the travelling experience is related almost entirely to the staff they encounter.
I put it to you that an airline's staff are more important than planes, in this day of aircraft leasing, same with buildings, same with any piece of physical infrastructure; the only differentiator between one airline and another is the people who operate that airline.

I agree.

Having a reliable IT infrastructure is probably more important in some ways than having aeroplanes, strange though it may seem. If you have problems with aeroplanes, you can transfer to other flights, codeshare, wet/dry lease, cancel and rebook, etc. If you have a complete IT failure, you don’t even know who your passengers are!

“Going manual” is not a viable option these days due to complexity and de-skilling.

I believe BA do use a version of Amadeus Altea ! I'm not sure if it is connected to any in house systems though.

That's got nothing to do with it, going Manual is not an option because you cant transmit the APIS data to the government.

Part of the “complexity”, yes...?