BA’s Terminal 5 proving to be one big hub of chaos
31 March 2008Terminal 5 was supposed to be the saving grace for British Airways and London Heathrow, one of the most congested airports in Europe. Instead, as the glitzy new terminal enters its second week, passengers are bracing for more chaos.British Airways canceled another 54 flights at the new terminal Monday as it struggled with the computerized baggage-handling system that has already led to at least 15,000 pieces of misdirected baggage. The airline, which has canceled more than 250 flights since the gleaming terminal opened Thursday as its main hub, said Monday that the situation was improving daily and that it hoped to fly at full capacity again soon.
But the disruptions, which are set to last for at least the rest of this week, could not come at a worse time for British Airways, which had enjoyed a turnaround under its chief executive, Willie Walsh, who cut jobs and focused on the more lucrative premium travel business between the United States and Britain.
source: International Herald Tribune
1 April of 2008 at 01:49
This was bound to happen and the evidence was there from many years coming. Allow me to explain.
Together with the rest of the UK the language of the UK has changed in say the past 30 years. Words such as “customers” feature very prominently and are intimately related to promotion propects of anyone in Britain today. Gone are the days when COMPLEX things were undertaken correctly, because COMPLEXITY requires concepts such as “CLIENT BENEFIT” but our “business” leaders speak about “customer satisfaction”. Today I saw the CEO of British Airways apologizing to “customers” at T5 as if the solution to the problem is related to “customer satisfaction” rather than to client benefit, rather than to having someone in charge of British Airways with high technical education, someone with a PHD for example.
I am convinced that all of this mess has to do with having a bunch of uneducated people at the top of these firms such as British Airways. Typically you get “managers” and “people persons” and “aggressive MBA types” who all speak about “our customers” and that is how they get promoted.
Delivering a T5 is a complex system which requires that sufficient people at the top of BA and BAA have a very solid technical training to handle the complex. Life is not simple, it is complex, and so you need extremely numerate people, “German Engineers” to run such an operation, rather than these overpaid and political people sheisters.
I never fly BA. Once they tried to sell me an upgrade to the flat bed in business class and the cabin crew described the seat as “a product”. “let me show you the product” he said. So I replied “It is not a product man it is just a seat”.
You see this in premium economy. The seat looks very beautiful but it is unccomfortable as hell.
My view is that I just fly airlines such as Iceland Air of the Far East airlines, societies that reward and place the research engineers in charge of things.
So there is my explanation about why the mess occurred in T5