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Currently docked in St Petersburg, Russia, surrounded by seven other cruise ships!
Clearly St Petersburg is a must see destination, and what better way to experience it?
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Steaming through the Baltics to St Petersburg, on a state of the art cruise ship, having days ago, walked onto the Royal Caribbean International ship at Southampton, dropped the cases, for direct delivery by unseen hands, directly to my stateroom, and headed for the nearest on-board pub (Two Poets... and only just an hour away from the next meal.... and Bobby Davro on the theatre bill tonight ) you really have to wonder why people many with families, still put up with the likes of British Airways under the 'cut and slash budget style' chair and CEOship of Bilbao born Mr Cruz ?
But then up pops his boss Willie Walsh who runs the IAG group, the parent company. Clearly Mr Walsh read our earlier blog suggesting that he steps up to the plate, rather than leave it to the gentleman wearing a high viz jacket, standing in the middle of his office to deliver yet another soothing twitter message...which in reality had the opposite effect.
Effectively BA ceased in many peoples eyes to be the UK national flag carrier, when it sold out to the Spanish based group and is now just another generic marketing brand alongside several others competing for attention, from the airline's parent company.
Having listened to Mr Walsh, what he says seems to be a rational argument you would feed to a lay person, who just uses e-mail and possibly surfs a bit the type of IT we all enjoyed back in the 70's, but it is a bit of a stretch to put the whole thing down to an "engineer".
Pardon for asking, but don't engineers wear hard hats, twist things with spanners and fix the rest with hammers? If Mr Walsh had said technicians or computer personnel, it might not have raised a huge question mark over the whole explanation, and he might have go away with his remarks not being put under the microscope
This is how the BBC Technology Correspondent reported it :
"Put simply, an "engineer" cut the data centre's power, messed up the reboot and fried the circuits, he has said. His explanation has raised eyebrows amongst former British Airways IT workers I've spoken to. There are big red "panic" buttons to cut all the power in the computer room". Leaving aside the idea of big red failsafe buttons. What Mr Walsh is suggesting is the UPS (uninterruptable power supply) was affected - UPS keeps the network afloat for twenty minutes using battery power when the mains goes down) but it all went downhill almost instantly.
What isn't explained is was the so called technician working on the new TATA computer hardware accelerators? These are being introduced to the BA system by the Tata Indian computer consultancy group who recently imported a number of Indian trained and born 'engineers' to work on the BA system and to work at the BA engineering site in Wales?
You see where Mr Walsh has seemingly given the game away?
BA Engineering as we have previously reported 'hopped into bed' with the TATA Consultancy group a few years back, and effectively handed the whole shooting match over to the Indian Company and its imported to UK, Tier 2 UK Visa holders.... the Unions keep getting this wrong, its not a question of jobs being lost and exported to India. Indian nationals are being imported to the |UK, and probably only they know how the TATA 'secret' hardware accelerators operate...
Clearly the statement Mr Walsh was handed, originated from BA engineering (who currently have care and control of all computing systems) so the natural choice of words would be 'engineer' rather than 'technician', 'IT worker' or 'computer consultant'.
Simply old terminology has a habit of sticking around. But somehow the system went down not power down but with a bit of a bang or a power surge and in the process took out any emergency back up and we are not taking about a UPS system that anyone can buy off the shelf for a couple of hundred dollars (or are we?).
But let us examine all the chestnuts? BA would not taken the system out during a busy period? Well yes they would, as its still a worldwide airline and has aircraft in the air around the clock ,but there is nothing to stop sections of the system being worked on either by re-routing or a simple swap out of a unit or two.
It happened over a bank holiday period.. This would suggest the system was operating at maximum capacity, under the old pre TATA consultancy collaboration ie 'in-house' BA would have had hundreds of long experienced BA Computer technicians, on the payroll and working on the spot, affectionately nursing the old legacy systems along, and not accepting digital instructions from a remote location such as Wales or possibly Mumbai.
The on-screen text of some of the 'fail messages' would also suggest by their construction, the author was not a native of the UK and English not his/her first language!
Once you introduce any form of extensive external computer consultancy, you put your system at their mercy, it could well be that whole sections of your house systems could be digitally exported to that firms global network and in the switching process the melt down happened.
But Mr Walsh was so clearly not mentioning TATA Consulting and refused to confirm if their people had control of the BA (possibly legacy (ie old) computing units).
So you'll get the idea, that we are not impressed with the explanation and the panacea that an independent firm will conduct an investigation is one step nearer, however if that independent firm is one of the big accountancy groups turned consultants that too could present problems.
Better if BA/ IAG called in the British Computer Society and really sourced an independent IT firm, but there again would TATA allow its secrets to be shared with the investigation firm? The old BA system would seem to be installing these secret TATA hardware accelerators, which are we understand the intellectual property of the Tata consultants and they certainly would not be willing to have a third party reverse engineer their top secret work!
JULIAN BRAY +44(0)1733 345581, Journalist & Broadcaster, Aviation Security & Airline Operations Analyst/expert, www.freelancedirectory.org?name=Julian.Bray.aviation.comment Travel / Maritime & Cruise Industry, NUJ, EQUITY, LIVE ISDN LINK, Broadcast ISDN COOBE ++44 (0)1733 345020 e&oe Old faithful NOKIA: 07944 217476 www.aviationcomment.com
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