Major airlines are at increasing risk of breakdowns in the systems their daily operations depend on owing to the challenges of integrating digital technology with decades-old booking systems.
That is view of Srinath Mallya, head of travel and logistics at US technology firm Syntel.
British Airways was not the first carrier to suffer a systems meltdown following a power surge.
Delta Airlines suffered a similar major systems malfunction in August last year after a power outage brought down its Atlanta-based reservations system causing cancellation of 650 flights and multiple delays.
And Southwest Airlines of the US suffered a problem at its Dallas data centre in July last year.
Delta declined to comment on its shutdown, just as BA has up to now.
An industry source suggested BA’s meltdown came when the power to a data centre went down and systems were not turned back on gradually.
But Mallya told Travel Weekly: “A lot of airlines have had similar problems.”
Mallya identifies the wider problem as “mainframe systems that are decades old”, saying: “Many industries use legacy systems.
“Banking and retail have also been hit. What is peculiar to airlines are Transaction Processing Framework (TPF) reservations systems.
“These TPF systems excel at processing high volumes of transactions. They are also used for processing card payments. They can process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second and are highly reliable.
“But customers want mobile access, personalisation, new forms of payment, loyalty payments, and there are flight-planning and crew-planning systems on top.
“It becomes a patchwork of new and old systems, a patchwork of integrations. Fault lines develop around the integrations and make the system unreliable.”
Mallya said: “A power outage could affect any system, but a modern system would be more reliable.
“The basic architecture of a modern system is distributed so there are multiple nodes to handle transactions. Power outages are generally localised. A distributed system allows you to deal with that.
“Also, most modern systems have automatic monitoring. If there is a problem, they switch to another mode without the end-user knowing. There is a seamless transfer of work.”
Airlines have faced a problem in switching from these legacy reservations systems until recently, he said.
“You can’t easily move from a TPF to a distributed system. It used to take four to five years and tens of millions of dollars. Airlines tended to think ‘TPF is not broken, why fix it?’
“But now the technology has progressed to the point that an airline could migrate from a legacy system within 12-18 months.”
Power outages: a growing issue for airlines
Delta suffered a power outage, or failure, at its Atlanta headquarters in the early hours of August 8. Georgia Power engineers concluded it was caused by a switchgear failure.
The airline told passengers: “Our systems are down everywhere.” It subsequently said: “Some critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to Delta’s backup systems.”
The carrier had to cancel about 10% of its daily schedule. Many more flights were delayed.
Southwest Airlines suffered a similar problem on July 20, cancelling 2,300 flights over four days.
An airline systems outage has immediate knock-on effects which accumulate as flights can’t take off, airport gates remain occupied so arriving aircraft can’t disembark passengers, crew can’t change flights, aircraft and crew are then out of position, and so on.
Analysts warn carriers face increasing risk of disruption as so much technology, for everything from bookings and boarding passes to personalised fare offers, is integrated.