Slashdot Mirror
British Airways Passengers Delayed By Computer Glitch (bbc.com)
Reader rastos1 writes: British Airways told customers that some flights were cancelled on Monday "due to operational reasons." The airline apologized to customers, saying its IT teams were "working to resolve this issue". [...] a professional poker player from London, told the BBC she had queued for a flight in Las Vegas for two and a half hours. "My boarding pass was filled out by hand. Even had a hand-written hand baggage label. Staff were updating us well; The staff... were excellent. The pilot said the delays were due to a computer glitch and apologized profusely."This comes less than a month after Delta Air Lines and Vienna Airport both had their services disrupted due to computer glitches.
Had a friend flying BA with Gatwick today. Was slightly slower than usual apparently. It seems pen and paper isn't such a bad substitute.
So is this going to be another "computer glitch" where the "computer glitch" was actually an electrical fire caused by power equipment? Everyone is quick to blame computers.
If what you say is true, I'd rather be sitting at the gate then in the plane on the tarmac for hours! Seems like the problem was handled very well.
And fly British Airways.
it's the Russians.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That is the preferred way...
Evidently I struck a nerve. So I guess I'll have to post AC on the matter from here on out... *sigh*
Er...two hour flight delays are now Slashdot-worthy? Let me tell you about every other trip I've taken through Chicago then.
Doesn't it kill you when computers are blamed for problems or are given credit for infallibility?
Here we have a case of computers being blamed for the incompetence of people. Because let's face it, someone somewhere screwed up to cause this problem.
And then there is when you see a mistake or problem and you here, "the computer figured it out!", implying that you need to STFU - like whoever programmed it is infallible or whoever was entering the data is infallible.
When I'm in a snarky mood, I'll make something up like, 'Ah, I see! The finance program is using the Turing floating point method and that's why it's charging an extra $12 a month."
"Yes, exactly!"
Salespeople and customer service people! You gotta just laugh at them.
Goddamn leavers. It's all their fault.
Hopefully, the glitch does not provide time a window with less background checks for the passengers.
The delay was because 9 terrorists from Black-Lives-Matter entered the runaway illegally and chained themselves there to impede their removal.
Coinicdentally at the same time a computer glitch occured.
So is this going to be another "computer glitch" where the "computer glitch" was actually an electrical fire caused by power equipment? Everyone is quick to blame computers.
Kind of a pet peeve of mine. For all practical purposes there is no such thing as a "computer error". Computers are machines that do exactly what they were designed and instructed to do. Nearly everything we casually refer to as a "computer glitch" is really a human error once you dig through the abstraction layers. It might be a bad bit of code or a poorly designed piece of hardware or inadequately spec'ed equipment or failure to account for (possibly severe) environmental factors or inadequate data redundancy but at the end of the day these are ALL human errors in reality. We built the machines and told them what to do so if the machines don't function as expected that is at some level the fault of a human.
The computer just provides a convenient way to hide the person actually responsible for the mistake. But it is a human mistake somewhere along the line in all but a hand full of cases.
The Canadians also apologized profusely.
BA just got done offshoring a lot of their IT operations to Tata, and from what I've been reading, TCS wrote the new software that's causing the issues. I'll give them benefit of the doubt and assume the software at least works. What I assume is happening is what is happening in IT departments all over the place. Offshore Vendor X delivers software with barely adequate documentation to a skeleton crew onshore group that has to try to make it work. And yes, I have relevant experience -- airline IT is one of those fields that you have to develop a lot of domain knowledge to even understand what's going on.
I have seen this in many different industries...they try to offshore something core to their business to a group of random Java programmers who have no clue what it is they're writing or what business process they're supporting. And because these offshore guys operate a revolving-door employment operation, anyone who actually does learn what's going on quickly leaves or becomes a manager -- thus starting the process again with a fresh new grad.
Until companies realize they save money in the long run by carefully managing a directly-engaged, fully involved workforce this will keep happening. You can't keep dead wood around forever, but some of the operations I've seen lately have basically been chopping down the tree and setting it on fire.
You might be surprised to learn that people managed to get on airplanes before computers existed, and that they used to run entire airlines without a computer or an internet.
Nobody has gotten on a commercial passenger airplane without computers being involved in decades. Yes they did used to run substantially smaller airlines without computers but given the scale of modern air travel that would be hugely inefficient and costly, not to mention even more error prone than it already is.
If they did it all with typewriters and ink pens, they wouldn't have a single point failure (power interruption) that inconvenienced a lot of people.
Power interruption is still a thing with pens and typewriters unless you don't care about being able to see what you are doing or operate the airport terminal. But never mind that, the loss of the ability to communicate data would be crippling. Good luck communicating flight schedules, passenger and cargo manifests, purchase orders, ticketing and boarding passes, accounting, and much more without hiring an army of support staff. Air travel would immediately become uneconomical for all but the wealthiest of people.
My boss is currently stuck in England - we was not able to make his return flight to the USA due to all this.
No complaints here. :)
Yeah, sure, "glitch".
Try, intentional hack.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You are correct.
But they won't admit it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
:-) Somebody let the mods know. They want to cover it up also.
Posting AC so they don't nick me for this one also. There's a strong appeal to authority going on here. You don't dare contradict the Official Narrative without getting tagged.
- fusta
"Enhance your customer experience, generate new revenue opportunities, achieve higher efficiency and stay ahead of competition with our innovative airlines IT solutions." ref
Democracy Now! exposes this lie. Search for "Black Lives Matter Activists Shut Down London City" [Airport] at http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/6/headlines