Surprising Secret to Fixing Airline Computers: Performing Heart Surgery While Running!

When Antony Knights and his wife, Louise Firth, first noticed that their British Airways flight to Berlin from London’s Heathrow Airport was delayed, they were neither surprised nor greatly concerned.

But shortly thereafter they and others waiting for their flight on May 25 were shocked to be told to leave the airport terminal. Their service, like around 80 other British Airways departures that day, had been canceled due to a computer failure which caused suffering for thousands of travelers as the chain disruption forced the cancellation of more departures the next day.

The experience of the couple – who had been planning the trip to Berlin since September – has become increasingly common for airline passengers as companies have been hit by repeated computer failures.

The carriers of the German Lufthansa group had to do this in February Cancel nearly 200 flights after construction workers severed a fiber optic cable vital to the group’s reservations systems.

Southwest Airlines in the US had to cancel around 15,000 flights in one week in December last year thanks to a mix of severe weather and computer and telephone systems that crumbled under extreme demands. British Airways has suffered repeated similar episodesin February and March of last year.

The incidents highlight how aging electronics in the airline industry have combined with operational problems at some carriers to make system fragility a pressing concern. John Strickland, a London-based aviation consultant, said airlines depend on computer systems whose oldest elements sometimes date back decades. Many now need very delicate handling.

“Over the years, new upgrades have been bolted in in stages to create very complicated systems,” Strickland said.

Yet the question, according to Becrom Basu, a partner at management consultancy LEK, is whether airlines can introduce wholesale change in an industry that never quite shuts down.

“I think if you ask anyone in the industry, they’d say it’s like open heart surgery while you’re still trying to race,” Basu said of introducing new, more reliable systems. “It’s one of those things that most people don’t want to deal with if they can help it.”

Airline staff told Knights and Frith to rebook themselves on another flight. But the pair, both marine biologists from the University of Plymouth, found that other departures filled up faster than Heathrow’s overloaded WiFi connection would allow them to get seats. Realizing they had no chance of getting to Berlin for the concert they intended to attend, they instead drove 200 miles home.

While the couple are awaiting possible compensation from the airline, Knights said the trip so far has been just an expensive waste of time.

“At the moment, it’s cost us £2,000 to drive to Heathrow and back,” he said.

The technology of traditional network airlines such as British Airways is particularly vulnerable because it is generally older than that of new low-cost competitors. They also have to handle complex transactions like baggage transfers at airport hubs that low-cost carriers usually avoid.

Additionally, many older airlines have systems that are partially integrated with major groups, while also serving a single airline brand. British Airways is part of the larger International Airlines Group with Iberia, Aer Lingus, Vueling and Level. The Lufthansa group includes Austrian, Swiss, Brussels Airlines and Eurowings, as well as the main German flag carrier.

In addition to airline issues, some flights over the past year have been affected by IT failures of public sector organizations.

On 27 May, two days after British Airways’ latest problems began, automated ePassport gates at several UK airports stopped working due to a computer failure. On January 11 of this year, 1,300 domestic flights were to be made in the United States canceled after a Federal Aviation Administration system that warned pilots of aviation hazards was unavailable for nearly two hours. Hardly any flights could take off.

“IT is so diverse in the airline industry and goes back many decades, especially when it comes to . . . the complexity of getting one aircraft system to talk to another,” Strickland said.

Basu said the capacity of many systems was limited because they were hosted entirely on airline computer systems. More modern systems tended to be cloud-based, a network of third-party operated remote servers that offer much greater access to capacity at peak times.

“If you take it all together — capabilities, inheritance, and interface complexity — that’s why they become brittle,” Basu said.

Some of the problems are addressed. Southwest has promised this year to invest $1.3 billion — 25 percent more than last year — in information technology. He recognized that during Winter Storm Elliott in December its “crew optimization” software was overwhelmed, losing track of who should be flying where. A phone-based alternative quickly caught on.

The airline, a pioneer in low-cost aviation, is unusual among low-cost carriers in addressing such problems. However, it sends crews and aircraft on complex multi-day itineraries through its network. Other budget airlines, including Ireland’s Ryanair, follow a simpler scheme of basing planes in a city, flying them to a destination and then directly to their base.

Southwest is investing in an upgrade of the crew software and crew phones. Andrew Watterson, the airline’s chief operating officer, said when he announced the “priority actions” that he was confident in the airline’s “future path”.

Yet even the airlines have little prospect that Knights, Firth and the other passengers detained in late May will be the last to fall victim to the industry’s technological woes.

British Airways said it was launching a “robust investment plan” aimed at improving its IT infrastructure. It said it has already moved a third of its IT systems to the cloud, to take advantage of those systems’ greater flexibility.

The airline was building “more resilience” into its existing systems, it added. An insider pointed out that the May 25 failure led to the cancellation of only about 10% of total flights on May 25 and 26, which is lower than in previous incidents of this type.

However, the airline also warned that its investments and cloud migration would not be realized immediately. “This takes time,” she said.

Knights, a frequent traveler due to his job, questioned the company’s commitment to customer service on occasions when its systems went down.

“I’m not sure what their business model is,” he said of BA. “But it doesn’t seem to work.”