British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control' The Register can exclusively reveal that the "IT issue" behind the ongoing chaos at British Airways was due to problems with how its systems interact with the Vodafone platform. Although the problem, which started yesterday, has since been fixed, the baggage system mixup was so severe that passengers were placed on flights …
I've never liked flying, I always thought it was just a bus with wings with added inconvienience and price gouging. But these days I think I'm doing buses a disservice they are nothing like as bad as planes.
I'll also usually avoid longer train journeys too since rail travel has normally decended to farce whevever I've had to rely on it.
"I'll also usually avoid longer train journeys too since rail travel has normally decended to farce whevever I've had to rely on it."
In the US, you go into a train journey with lower expectations if you are smart. If you expect delays, you don't stress as much. With flights, you are expecting to be on time, get your bags and wind up where you thought you were going.
I'm a big fan of trains. There's plenty of room for improvement, but fewer queues, no mad charges from everything and no fondling by government workers that couldn't secure employment in the fast food industry.
It would be nice if airlines and airports treated passengers as paying customers and not as items of meat to shuttle from one queue to the next. We have given up traveling if it involves an aeroplane or airports of any description :-(
There is a special place in hell for the designers of CDG in Paris!
The truth is that passengers like having shorter queues, more legroom, more luggage allowance, decent in-flight meals etc. And back when EVERY airline and airport offered all of those, a 2-3 hour flight across Europe could cost E400-500 return. The reality is that in the end, passengers vote with their feet, and it turns out the majority of passengers actually would rather pay <E100-200 for a ticket, and then complain about being gouged for E50-100 for luggage and another E50-100 for meals, priority boarding or a decent seat.
The companies raced to the bottom happened because that's where the majority of passengers already were
"The reality is that in the end, passengers vote with their feet, and it turns out the majority of passengers actually would rather pay <E100-200 for a ticket"
It was the airlines chasing volume. When I am planning a trip, price isn't the whole criteria. Perhaps somebody 4'10" and slight of build can do ok in a modern economy seat, but I'm 6' and my shoulders are several inches wider than a standard airline seat. Happily, train seats are plenty wide and the legroom is fabulous. It also helps that I can get up and walk around, get a snack/meal, have a power point at my seat and occasionally have cell coverage.
"Upvoted for CDG but the truth is that margins for airlines are so low, they can no longer afford the kind of service you want."
They all raced to the bottom and the walls are too slippery to climb back up. There are charter operators that can be much nicer but you have to do more planning since they don't always run a regular schedule. Pay more, get more (or less queues).
When I was young, flying was a rare thing and quite the event. Now people show up in their pajamas, what they were wearing at the strip club the night before and complain loudly that they aren't being waiting on hand and foot. "Why didn't the plane wait? I called and told them I was going to be late" (didn't mention the drunk part).
> It would be nice if airlines and airports treated passengers as paying customers
The problem is that from the airports point of view, passengers do not pay them, the airlines do.
I believe that all the ground operations at airports are solely run by the airport, not the airlines. So it is unfair to blame BA for this shambles. However, the only airline that operated from Terminal 5 is BA (and Iberia), so it is easy for the media to conflate the two
The airlines get to choose from the multiple baggage handlers that operate at the airport, but they can't bring it in house or use a baggage handler that is not already partnering with the airport. Some airports have a single baggage handler for all airlines where the baggage handler pays the airport a significant fee to be the only supplier.
Maybe that is because it is a race to the bottom on price because everyone wants the luxury of air travel for leisure but does not want to pay. Then they complain when they are charged extra for a bag etc.
Air travel have became just another mass-transit variant but for some reason people believe they are entitled to some sort of first class service.
Agreed but Frankfurt comes a close second. FRA lost my bags 6 times in the 1990's, CDG only once.
I've not flown for almost 8 years. In the period 2013-2016, I was away more nights that I was at home with my job.
Airlines ONLY treat those flying at the very front of the plane as human beings. The rest of us are cattle to be led to the slaughterhouse (if Flying a Max-8)
(I am the Original AC)
I know your comment was meant to be a joke *but* it has actually been as you stated .... almost !!!
My luggage was lost on the outward flight ... after some calls/debate etc it was 'decided' that the luggage was probably not sent out on the same plane as myself.
I purchased some clothes at the extensive(!!!???) shops on a south-american holiday island ... the airline admitted that the luggage was *still* in the UK but would be sent to me as fast as possible.
The holiday ended and I flew back to the UK with my *new* clothes in a cheap plastic case... at the airport I queried where exactly my original luggage was (!!!???)
The airline was still not too sure but I was advised that it would be found.
I was told the next day after more chasing that the luggage had been loaded onto a plane to be sent to my holiday destination, before the airline could stop the wasted journey ... my luggage then travelled to Caracas (venezuela) then to the holiday island then back to Caracas then back to the UK to my original exit airport, each hop in the journey was delayed for 'reasons' and I was able to drive to the (not-local) airport to pick up my luggage 1 week after my original return date. !!!
The case was somewhat battered after all the travelling and had been forced open by airport security or someone and had been closed again with sticky-tape used to compensate for the lack of a working lock !!!
I never liked travelling by plane *but* this put me off the idea for life ... I travel by plane only because I am forced to !!!
:)
1. If I look at the departure list for Heathrow at the time of typing, Atlanta is there, but Seattle, New York, Miami, and Boston are also there on page one of the list.
2. Regardless, if it is going to Atlanta, it shouldn't be on the arrivals hall at Heathrow. It is more likely that there was a layover or changing planes at Heathrow and it should have been loaded on to the next plane rather than taken to the arrivals hall.
Only if you fly Delta or one of the others in their alliance.
United and American use different hubs but the concept is the same with the Hub and Spoke model.
One time I went to the US on business (San Diego was the destination), they routed me via Chicago with a NINE hour layover just to save $20 on a direct flight. Madness as I spent more than that on Food/drink during the layover. After that, I flew direct with BA.
I think the 350 new employees might have more importance on that side of the business.
Pseudo-AI can always plan for the plane to depart by 6:30, if not enough hands are available to load the luggage, top up the tanks and get the passengers inside, it won't happen, period.
Oh, and side question : is that pseudo-AI going to be using FPGAs , or regular climate-destroying GPUs ?
Mid 1990's I designed a system to help a warehouse (for one of the major supermarket chains) to receive orders until 22:00 from 60+ stores and get the first stores goods picked and packed into an artic by 22:30 (and that could be multiple stores packed in the correct reverse order into the one artic.) The orders did not arrive at pre-determined times and so the last to arrive might be the one that had to depart first! (All stores had defined times that they could receive the goods, often set by the local council or the shopping centre, and often only a 30 minute window.) The crux was that there was only room to pick and stand 5 lorries concurrently. The last lorry had to leave at around 03:30.
Yes, the algorithms were tricky, but they worked - except for reaching the target times. I sat there for 3 weeks of nights watching the 3 ladies who performed the task manually (but with difficulty) to pick up all the 'extra' rules they applied, and coding these in the daytime. Only when my algorithms could match all service commitments for 3 consecutive days did the actual switch over complete.
The point of this story, is that even when one of the ladies was replaced while she took a holiday, with a supervisor who supposedly knew the system inside out, (and for a few days after she returned), the service levels could not be consistently achieved. Hence the requirement to replace them with a computer. However, it was not just one computer, we had to design a completely dual-redundant system, because everyone knew that, although the 3 ladies were still employed on-site and on the same shift (but doing much nicer jobs), even after a couple of weeks of not doing the job (as per when they had been on holiday), they would not be up-to-speed enough to replace a broken computer and meet the service levels.
So I say that throwing your "Mongolian Hoard" of grunts to manually move all the baggage, is highly unlikely to achieve a satisfactory conclusion.
I realise just how huge these baggage operations are, but surely there is some possibility that a manual backup system can be used in these situations. An airlines luggage is surely collected in one place, there is a tag on it that says where it is going, can someone not get a team together and load up a truck, shove it all on the plane?
Seems to me IT whilst being amazing and provides my bread and butter, has also become our crutch. People refuse to actually get their hands dirty and do work these days as soon as a system falls over. Even if they only got a few planes loaded, surely that is better than sending passengers off without it? What on earth did they used to do before computerised luggage systems?
What on earth did they used to do before computerised luggage systems?
What, when maybe 10% of the number of people who fly today were going somewhere?
The problem - as with most things - is the number of people. Most systems we have in place not just in the aviation industry simply haven't kept up with the real demands that were inevitably going to be placed on them. This is likely to get worse before (or if) it gets better. In all areas of life.
I think you'll find that it was "Terminal 5 was built only a few years ago with a state of the Fart baggage handling system" FTFY
If you're feeling particularly juvenile (I know I am), checkout https://www.youtube.com/user/StateOfTheFart - I'll never think of Toto in the same way again.
They used to have enough staff to do it manually?
But now that everything is computerised they can do the whole thing with less staff and more profits, and so it all works fine.
Except that the remaining staff are probably constantly overworked anyway ( but hey, profits!), and when the system goes down there aren't remotely enough people to make it work manually
The airlines keep saying that prices are low and there is no price gouging and they don't make any profit. This has NOT been my experience.
I travel every year to visit family overseas and the prices have become utterly extortionate in recent years. And it doesn't stop once you've bought your ticket, after you are committed, they hit you with all the hidden charges, like paying extra £100 per person to sit next to the rest of your family. It's a pure scam. All that painfully extracted money is going somewhere and if they are not making a profit it's because their accountants are hiding it.
There is an often quoted story they tell on management training courses about an airline executive that saved the company millions by removing a single olive from the inflight meal. The moral of the story is that you can make more money by screwing over your customers and giving them less service than what they paid for. BA in particular have taken this to heart and take special care to screw over their customers at every opportunity. I avoid using them whenever possible because it's an utterly horrible experience. BA are the "world favourite airline" in the same way that dysentery is the "worlds favourite intestinal disease".
"Except that the remaining staff are probably constantly overworked anyway ( but hey, profits!), and when the system goes down there aren't remotely enough people to make it work manually"
And the 3-ring binder that describes how to do it manually has been sent off to a consultant so they can make updated graphics.
Whenever I hear about stores such as a Tesco that suddenly freeze solid when there's an issue with an outsourced data processor, I have to wonder why they've never had anybody do a risk analysis and do something such as have in-store computers that can "island" until the outside computing can be put back in order. Having a secondary payment processor so people can pay digitally if the primary falls down should be in place as well with redundant network providers. Even if the secondary systems are slow, it's still better than off.
30+ years back, I used to work for a firm that supplied Tesco with their till systems, and the new superstore systems specified every till having three netwirk connections over 3 100% independent networks back to 3 minicomputers in the back office, with failover redundancy such that any one of them could switch to running the whole store if needed.
But that was back in the days when a dial-up modem was fine for the amount of data that went back to head office, all transactions were reconciled by overnight processing and paper reports, and paying by card meant having your credit card put in a slidey clamp that embossed the details on a multipart carbon receipt. These days everything has to be instant and online, which means no connection = no workey.
Also harangued and abused by the customers who think that the answer to everything is to start yelling, being abusive and threatening.
It does not matter where you are, my wife is a primary school teacher and they regularly get parent's in being abusive because Tallulah, Isaiah, Petal or Trig did not receive top marks (they have no intention of trying to learn, school is just free childcare) or were throwing tables/chairs because they were unhappy about being told to sit down and not be disruptive so were removed from the classroom.
Road rage, supermarkets employees, the list goes on.
Yet many of those will be the first to rant if they are on the receiving end of it,
"or were throwing tables/chairs because they were unhappy about being told to sit down and not be disruptive so were removed from the classroom."
A new law in California that goes into effect on July 1 is that kids can't be disciplined for disruptive behavior. It's not fair to the brats that have socialization issues.
And they wonder why couples are choosing not to have kids or only one that they can send to private school or have a parent stay home to properly raise them.
" Even if they only got a few planes loaded, surely that is better than sending passengers off without it?"
Nope. It would be better for the passengers who get to fly with their luggage. But probably not for anyone else.
When loading bags (or passengers) takes too long, it can badly fuck everything up for the airline and airport. The plane is likely to lose its take off and ATC slots => a delay to get new ones. It will probably arrive late at its destination, delaying the return flight. In extreme cases, there could be no crew for that return flight because they've gone over their allotted flying hours. The knock-on effects of that can take days to put right: yet more cancelled flights because crews and planes are in the wrong place. And while a plane is delayed at the gate waiting for bags to be loaded, it blocks another plane from using it, creating even more logistical problems and delays.
Airlines will have worked out when the hassle and costs from missed bags are less than those for a few hours when a plane is doing nothing or stuck at the wrong airport. Except for Ryanair of course. They don't give a shit about anything - apart from ripping people off.
"Airlines will have worked out when the hassle and costs from missed bags are less than those for a few hours when a plane is doing nothing or stuck at the wrong airport."
Better for whom? Not for the passengers who end up without their baggage.
If the airlines were obliged to pay to provide a couple of changes of clothing, toiletries and new baggage to put them in at the destination the working out might reach a different conclusion.
Within the EU they actually are obliged to, they just often pretend they aren't. RyanAir are particularly bad, to the point where the regulator has publicly considered suspending their licence to operate.
Brexit appears to have removed some of those consumer rights for flights within the UK or on UK carriers starting or ending in the UK. Exactly what that means (especially for codeshares like Iberia/Aer Lingus/BA), is going to pay a fair few lawyers.
Computerized bagtags have been around for more than 30 years.
Terminal 5 opened in 2008, 16 years ago.
Almost all other major airports have automated baggage systems, of varying levels of automation. As others have said, you just can't go manual on many aspects of airline operations these days - check-in, load balance, baggage.
Hmm. Vodafone don't do IT, just connectivity, so I wonder if 'interacting with the Vodafone Platform' just really means "our data sims have stopped working".
Vodafone are phasing out some of their data only sim plans; I got an email telling me that a Vodafone data only service I use is ceasing soon (1st August in case of the particular service that I use). What are the chances that someone at BA got a similar email, failed to act on it and the deadline to find an alternative to a Vodafone data only mobile service just came and went? Is this just a variant on the "forgot to renew a certificate" classic fail?
And they don't do that very well. I was with Vodafone since its inception. I left when my renewal contract has the wrong name (close, but not mine) wrong address and wrong amount... Don't worry, we'll sort it out when you've signed.. Thanks, but maybe not.
I was a contractor working for VF on a business-to-business offering. Vodafone had no clue at all.
Vodafone did not realise that the customer would expect the system to work reliably, and still be in place, 20+ years after it had started operating.
Vodafone were totally mobile-phone-oriented, and since mobile phones were essentially a fashion item in this period, they regarded anything more than three months from now as "long term planning".
So they believed that if the B2B offering was not selling well, they could Just Shut It Down. With zero notice, of course.
Did not understand nor care that the people who were using the service might have their lives depend on whether the service was working or not.
> I was a contractor working for VF on a business-to-business offering. Vodafone had no clue at all.
In the past I was also a contractor at Vodafone on multiple occasions working on both consumer and business oriented services.
> Vodafone were totally mobile-phone-oriented
I would dispute that.
For example Vodafone did a deal with BMW to embed a SIM into some of their European cars for in-car services ("https://www.vodafone.com/news/technology-news/bmw_connecteddrive") - that was/is obviously mobile-based but not mobile-phone based.
Also since 2012 Vodafone own what used to be Cable & Wireless Worldwide which was mainly a fixed-line and data circuits business with lots of (UK) Government and enterprise customers.
The problem with Vodafone is that they've never managed to adjust their model from the days when the profits came pouring in whatever they did to the current setup where they're just a dumb pipe with the perceived value sucked out of their infrastructure by over-the-top services such as WhatsApp. Their sadly predictable response has been to outsource, scale back, offshore, fire and generally persecute the core technical teams who once made them the best engineered network, leaving in place bloated and clueless armies of Product Managers, Facilitators, Department Liaison Representatives and other nonentities swanning around The Connection and Paddington Basin trying to look busy. The only thing saving them from total extinction is that the other operators have, equally predictably, followed them down the same path leaving a dismal race to the bottom of total operational and technical incompetence.
Putting it from a plane on a cart, drive it into the building at the dropoff conveyor, unload the cart, done.
Am I overlooking something here? Is this too easy?
If BA fails to unload an already landed plane "tonight" (within the next X hours), well that just .... unbelievable.
The act itself is easy, you just need to get the men[0] to the right place at the right time which is a much harder problem (not a million miles away from the optimisation problem that caver_dave describes up above)
[0] I don't ever recall seeing a woman do this job
A lot of the baggage arriving at LHR isn't intended to stay there, it needs to be routed to another flight. I'd expect that much of the complexity is in the scanning and rerouting of bags as they come out of the containers. Some bags will go directly to the onward flight, but others will be held in a store for several hours before the connecting flight shows up on the system, and a destination for the bags is known. IIRC they handle over 100m bags per year, that's not far off 300k bags per day on average.
The baggage handling system at T5 is the responsibility of BAA (British Airports Authority). BA is merely the main user of T5.
In a former life, I worked for a company that integrated the systems that all have to work together to make an airport terminal work. There can be 30+ different systems in a terminal.
now I must go and wash my mouth out with soap for saying that BA is right.
BAA is the wholly owned subsidiary of Ferrovial a Spanish company pretending to be Dutch for tax reasons.
Luckily for me they don't run any airports in Spain.
Its so depressing when you fly from the rather beautiful Madrid airport or the incredibly busy but smooth running Alicante airport and arrive at the shambolic collection of sheds at Heathrow or Gatwick. The UK used to be good at stuff but now it only excels at neglect.
Not sure about how this went down, but I presume that the individual airlines are to some degree responsible for telling the handling system which bags should go where.
The barcode on the bag tag contains the type of luggage (normal, offline, rush), the airline and a serial number. So if the automated system only has that barcode (making an assumption here), it'd only know that this is suitcase number 123456 travelling with BA as regular luggage, and BA would still need to tell it where that bag is supposed to be going.
Even if the system could read the destination airport code printed on the tag, there may still be several ways for the suitcase to get there, and you couldn't just send everything to the next plane leaving in that direction. Imagine a 737 receiving all the luggage for itself and an A380. The only thing the system could do is direct everything with its own airport code to manual processing.
So I suspect the airline is expected to provide the baggage handling system with a list along the lines of "this bag goes on belt 9, this bag goes on flight BA1234" etc. That list would have to come from BA. Or where did I go wrong?
There is one of those 'How Things Work' programmes on the wonders of T5's baggage system and the automation behind the miles of belts and baggage parks... and, yes, it's more than simply reading a barcode
Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a follow-up programme in the 'When Holidays Go Bad' series
Like so many of the other stories we see on here - no adequate Plan B is available if the tech falls over.
quote: leading-edge technology systems, AI and machine learning.
Bollocks to that. We would settle for things just working. Something that has been getting a lot rarer in the UK since The Political Policy That The BBC And Politicians Never Mention.
Someone should have started a 'None of the above' party. They would pull in so many votes at the election.
... that "how its systems interact with the Vodafone platform" means precisely nothing, and
... supplier (presumably) to the baggage handler straight under the bus, when it's the direct responsibility of the airline involved to handle the bags. It's as if we've all started accepting that outsourcing stuff means the provider of the actual service to the customer is perfectly allowed to immediately absolve themselves of responsibility.
Yes, I know they do general comms, I've used them for leased lines in the last few months (Vodafone circuit with an Openreach tail, no end of problems getting that installed, don't do it).
But I'd be curious to know why it was Vodafone's problem - a company that's responsible for shipping billions of voice and data packets a second and it's taken out a ... suitcase carousel? What?
Also, as "tin 2" said, the buck stops with the baggage handler company and the airport? The comms provider isn't responsible for this ... and if they are, why is there a single point of failure? Aren't we better than that now?
This particular issue might not be the fault of BA, but their systems and app are so unreliable that I've given up travelling with them. In the last year or so I;ve been travelling a lot for business and their app is so buggy I can't rely on whether I can use it for my boarding pass, check in, gate number etc. Yes, there are other back up options (check in when I get to the airport etc), but given how awful their app is, the manual backup options are used more than the convenient options, to the point where I just give up even trying.
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