At one time I actually liked to fly. Fast forward 30 years and I avoid it when ever I possibly can.

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.

Your baggage has been delayed due to leaves on the conveyor.

We will attempt to get your baggage to you on the last day of your holiday, as is tradition.

"We will attempt to get your baggage to you on the last day of your holiday, as is tradition."

You 'lucky lucky bastard', the usual service is 1 week after you arrive back ... Right little airlines pet you are .... etc etc

:)

The fact that many of those bags might be mobility aids is of far more concern.

Yeah, I remember seeing someone's wheelchair doing laps on a conveyor at Heathrow arrivals - the tag said Atlanta...

This should keep the pipeline of stories due to keyboard accidents full for a couple weeks.

BA + vodafone = double disaster

Hopefully they've got a top priority suitcase open with Vodafone...

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 [1]FPGA s , or regular climate-destroying GPUs ?

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/26/ai_model_fpga/

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.

Dividends have kept up nicely though, and after all, that's what matters isn't it?

Terminal 5 was built only a few years ago with a state of the art baggage handling system designed to handle large volumes of luggage. To substitute in a manual process would require a lot of extra staff...

"Out of our control" because our partners just show up unannounced, already in business with us.

No, they really won't.

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?

Vodafone doesn’t do anything technical including connectivity.

Everything is outsourced or contracted to someone else.

All that Vodafone employees do, of which there are a comparatively small number, is the fluffy stuff and contracts.

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.

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.

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.

Well, the Monster Raving Loony Party is still going

About the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow.

Hardcoded an IP address? They did say the nature of the issue was "dynamic!"

Amateurs.

It's always DNS...