Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 255 posts

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#51

Post by hdhzy »

tomschlick wrote: post #31

Airlines should band together and form working group to redevelop the old system in modern open source tech. Yes it would probably take 5+ years to develop and roll out, but they can't keep maintaining these 50 year old mainframes that cost them tens of millions a year in downtime.

> Airlines should band together and form working group to redevelop the old system in modern open source tech.

It's surprising how quickly one can suggest a solution based on... what exactly?

Imagine a doctor prescribing "this new fantastic medicine" based on "patient is sick" description. While personally I'm all for open source this is not a silver bullet and should be carefully considered.

Joel had an interesting blog post [0] back then about Netscape rewriting their software.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#52

Post by mtkd »

idlewords wrote: post #27
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.

Krakow is a big tech center, is in the EU, and it's not obvious why moving jobs there would have anything to do with a drop in quality.

replace a long established (expensive) team on a complex app who know all the bear-traps with an offshore team of rent-a-coders with a 6 month average turnover rate but at half the price - wcgw

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#53

Post by tajen »

markonen wrote: post #32
idlewords wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krakow is a big tech center, is in the EU, and it's not obvious why moving jobs there would have anything to do with a drop in quality.

It's not about Krakow per se. But when a company works towards specific targets like "90/10 supplier offshore ratio", rather than metrics based on quality or efficiency, I don't think quality comes first.

On the one hand I've never seen a successful project with non-colocated teams, whether 300km away or 10.000km away. On the other hand, I'm surprised a airplane company is so much localized in UK.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#54

Post by tyingq »

coldcode wrote: post #50

Airlines these days are run by a complex set of systems most of which have to work in order to have the airline function. I remember a few years ago SABRE (one of the 3 major GDS companies in the world) had a 4 hour outage (I worked for a division). Half the world's airlines stopped functioning. Generally these things seldom go down but when they do, hell breaks loose. Often these systems not only do reservations, bu…

Southwest was never on Sabre, per se. They had their own, separate reservation system, operated by Sabre the company, but not the main "Sabre Res System" / PSS. It was called SAAS, and sometimes "Cowboy".

They moved off of that recently though, and are now on Amadeus/Altea.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#55

Post by gmisra »

For reference, British Airways' parent company made a profit of €2.5 billion last year, and expects higher profits this year [0].

Without meaningful consequences at the top of the executive chain for sub-par IT/infrastructure quality, these kinds of incidents seem inevitable. But how do you hold people responsibly for "bad" software? We could adopt something akin to how PE licenses are required for civil engineering in the US. I suspect it is in the industry's best interest to address this need before a government entity decides to.

[0] http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-iag-results-idUKKBN1630MA

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#56

Post by mirekrusin »

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.

Not Krakow, Poland but India, via Tata about a year ago they made a big move.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#57

Post by branchless »

raesene9 wrote: post #49
branchless wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land costs are too high in the UK. Everything except banking must leave.

Land costs in the South East of England may be too high, but that really doesn't apply to the whole of the UK...

They are very high in most urban areas where you are likely to have a dev centre.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#58

Post by tim333 »

Quite a lot of mixed gossip in the Daily Mail article

>Yesterday's issues are the fourth BA failure in the past month, with problems on June 19, July 7 and July 13

>Union leaders say hundreds of BA staff complained about 'FLY' system and most workers say it's not fit for purpose

>A survey by GMB of 700 staff in June found that 89 per cent said training was poor, 94 cent suffered delays or system failures and 76 per cent said their health had suffered because of stress or anger aimed at them by frustrated passengers.

etc http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3695151/Philip-Schof...

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#59

Post by jjawssd »

tomschlick wrote: post #31

Airlines should band together and form working group to redevelop the old system in modern open source tech. Yes it would probably take 5+ years to develop and roll out, but they can't keep maintaining these 50 year old mainframes that cost them tens of millions a year in downtime.

You think these organizations can agree upon anything deeply technical?

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#60

Post by drinchev »

coldcode wrote: post #50

Airlines these days are run by a complex set of systems most of which have to work in order to have the airline function. I remember a few years ago SABRE (one of the 3 major GDS companies in the world) had a 4 hour outage (I worked for a division). Half the world's airlines stopped functioning. Generally these things seldom go down but when they do, hell breaks loose. Often these systems not only do reservations, bu…

Your comment reminds me of how crazy duct-tape and bubblegum is in our IT industry.
Post reply on HN