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British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

bbc.com

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Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#11

Post by Havoc »

tyingq wrote: post #6
crivabene wrote: post #2

I feel close to their IT staff having to deal with this on a Saturday afternoon. Partially OT: anyone wanting to share any on-call horror stories? :)

Airlines are especially stressful, as the problem compounds with time. Once you hit 45 minutes or so of downtime, you start invalidating downstream flight connections. Two hours in, and you've issues with crews not being legal to fly. Four hours in, and there's not enough capacity the following day to fix the missed flights from today, etc.

Note to self...never work in airline ops. That sounds like every day is on the edge of being a disaster.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#12

Post by CiaranMcNulty »

tyingq wrote: post #3

Shopping, flight status, etc, on their website is working, so their central reservations system isn't down. http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-40069977 says "A BA captain has said the failure affects the passenger and baggage manifests" So it's an legality/operational thing. Passengers can get boarding passes, etc, but the plane isn't allowed to take off without proper manifests.

According to reports on flying forums checking is being processed manually with huge queues as a result, flight status screens aren't working, etc.

Until an hour or so, ago login to the website was down for me.

So it seems it's a very widespread outage that they're in the process of recovering from

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#13

Post by crivabene »

markonen wrote: post #10

The main KPI for BA's IT function is the percentage of jobs they have moved "nearshore" (to Krakow). Not that I think this is the Krakow workers' fault, mind you; rather this (and the string of similar IT incidents recently at BA) seems to fit the pattern of upper management focusing on driving down costs to the exclusion of everything else.

Do you happen to know if they outsourced or if they opened a subsidiary there and just moved the positions?

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#14

Post by markonen »

crivabene wrote: post #13
markonen wrote: post #10

The main KPI for BA's IT function is the percentage of jobs they have moved "nearshore" (to Krakow). Not that I think this is the Krakow workers' fault, mind you; rather this (and the string of similar IT incidents recently at BA) seems to fit the pattern of upper management focusing on driving down costs to the exclusion of everything else.

Do you happen to know if they outsourced or if they opened a subsidiary there and just moved the positions?

It's a group function of the International Airlines Group (BA's corporate parent). http://www.iaggbs.com

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#15

Post by tyingq »

CiaranMcNulty wrote: post #12
tyingq wrote: post #3

Shopping, flight status, etc, on their website is working, so their central reservations system isn't down. http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-40069977 says "A BA captain has said the failure affects the passenger and baggage manifests" So it's an legality/operational thing. Passengers can get boarding passes, etc, but the plane isn't allowed to take off without proper manifests.

According to reports on flying forums checking is being processed manually with huge queues as a result, flight status screens aren't working, etc. Until an hour or so, ago login to the website was down for me. So it seems it's a very widespread outage that they're in the process of recovering from

Likely they turned both of those off on purpose. If you can't depart due to lack of a manifest, you turn off flight status and check-in.

I was able to do a flight status a little while ago though.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#16

Post by mtkd »

tyingq wrote: post #9
mtkd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are there commonly algos or decision support tools to help unravel that in an optimised way?

Sort of. The software is called "automated re-accommodation". But you're solving for several intertwined problems. Which aircraft models / tail numbers fly which flights...they have different seating capacities, nautical range, etc. Which crews are assigned to which aircraft. They aren't all qualified to fly every model. And, they aren't all in the right city, so you have to "deadhead" them there. And, finally, which…

I was in the middle of some major rail cancellations a couple of months back over 2 days - on the 3rd day many of the assets were out of place around the country - they were clearly trying to solve it manually and the impact escalated over the day even though most of the original problems had cleared

it's got to be a great problem to work on - and must be pretty rewarding to watch when you get it right

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#17

Post by kidjoedango »

I'm curious if anyone can give insight on how the passenger backlog is resolved in these situations. How was it done before smart digital systems (probably circa 1980's?) and how is it handled today given all the intertwined applications. I can imagine that it must be fascinating and equally exhausting on a grand scale.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#19

Post by emersonrsantos »

kidjoedango wrote: post #17

I'm curious if anyone can give insight on how the passenger backlog is resolved in these situations. How was it done before smart digital systems (probably circa 1980's?) and how is it handled today given all the intertwined applications. I can imagine that it must be fascinating and equally exhausting on a grand scale.

> before digital systems (probably circa 1980's?)

IBM offered ACP (Airline Control Program) with their new mainframes running OS/360 in 1965. Later they changed its name to ALCS and TPF, still used today by reservation systems.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#20

Post by tyingq »

kidjoedango wrote: post #17

I'm curious if anyone can give insight on how the passenger backlog is resolved in these situations. How was it done before smart digital systems (probably circa 1980's?) and how is it handled today given all the intertwined applications. I can imagine that it must be fascinating and equally exhausting on a grand scale.

>How was it done before smart digital systems

Manually. The TPF reservation systems have a concept of "Queues". They would place travel records that needed to be reaccommodated onto a queue. Then, reservations agents would "work the queues" from their green screens, make phone calls, etc.

>how is it handled today given all the intertwined applications

Depends on the airline, and the system, but the general answer is "partially automated". The processes for less widespread issues is more automated. Think like a major storm in the northeast. Global outages are less automated because you're dealing with multiple issues, not just passengers.

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