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.
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.
Er...two hour flight delays are now Slashdot-worthy? Let me tell you about every other trip I've taken through Chicago then.
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.
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.