at the Vanuatu departure lounge

Alex Cockburn is drawn into the T5 snafu, which he summarises as follows:

In the case of T5 the planners had forgotten to create parking slots for the baggage handlers. When the handlers finally got to the doors of T5 their security passes didn't work. The few that managed to get through didn't know where their work stations were. The baggage handling software had already failed.

I’ve said before that the political economy of New Labour is a kind of cargo cult of globalisation, and here we have it: a replica airport, just like the ones the real John Frummers build:

Famous examples of cargo cult activity include the setting up of mock airstrips, airports, offices, dining rooms, as well as the fetishization and attempted construction of western goods, such as radios made of coconuts and straw.

Well, we don’t need to do that. We can put actual wires in an actual box. But to have the software working, no, that would never do.

The problem seems to be here that the customers believe that travel is a result of human agency. But the point is to make the replica airport perfect in every particular to attract cargo from the gods. Additionally, if they dress like “business travelers” and express their piety through buying overpriced sandwiches at the airport prêt a manger franchise, then the big white bird will eventually appear and take them to the place that is their heart’s desire. It’s simply a matter of patience, and faith.

Comments

[Alex]

Sorry to earth your St Elmo, but I find your theory fails to explain how Chep Lap Kok in Hong Kong was an even bigger day-one fuckup, eventually resulting in the resignation of the Chief Executive's assistant, nor Denver (Stapleton) in 1995.

IT'S DIFFICULT, and you can't really rehearse, release-early release-often, or do any of the other well-known means of avoiding software failure with something that is a) part of a building the size of Keighley and b) dependent on the staff who keep the rest of the airport working, so you can't test without shutting down the rest.

[Alex]

Further, here's some comment from an actual software engineer.

[ejh]

dependent on the staff who keep the rest of the airport working, so you can't test without shutting down the rest

Yeah, this the point that occurred to me. But presumably it should also have occurred to the T5 people and they should at least have warned people of potential problems at the start?

Incidentally, in Spain this sort of thing would be normal as the concepts of preparation and advance warning appear to be unknown here.

[john b]

I don't really get how the T5 opening can be classed as a failure. That kind of complex system is always going to have the kind of bug you can only address by real-world testing, and if you're mad enough to stake your holiday or your business trip on alpha-testing a new airport then you deserve everything you get...

[dsquared]

Hmmm, Beijing managed to open a new airport without too many problems, and (I may be wrong on this but at the time I used it quite regularly) I don't recall Stockholm Airport having too many problems with their new terminal. So it is possible.

And I think it's the scale of the collapse that's the odd thing, not just the fact that it didn't work. The new terminal in Madrid had its systems fall over for the first couple of weeks, but they didn't end up in quite the hog's nest that Heathrow has.

[gdr]

you can't really rehearse, release-early release-often, or do any of the other well-known means of avoiding software failure

But you could ramp up the operation: start with only a handful of flights a day and work up to full capacity, giving you a chance to work out some of the bugs in an environment where small failures don't cascade into total disaster. Obviously expensive, but probably less expensive than cancelling hundreds of flights.

[john b]

As Alex says above, you can't really do that, because you don't have the staff, because they're working in the old terminal dealing with the flights you haven't transferred over...

[ejh]

Well, only if your staffing levels are tight to an excessive degree. Most workplaces can spare people to leave, training days, that sort of thing now and again.

[Gdr]

Well, that's what I meant by "obviously expensive" -- you are going to need extra staff or lots of paid overtime or a temporary reduction in the number of flights you operate, all of which are going to cost money. But is that really going to be more expensive (on average) than the chaos and disruption that happens when things don't go exactly to plan?

[Matthew]

I think it would be odd when told the news that something BA and BAA were involved in was a fiasco, not to assume some of it was due to BA and BAA's famous incompetence.

Also, before booking flights, do many people check a) the terminal and b) whether it co-incides with a new one opening? I have to say until last week I thought Terminal 5 was years from completion.

[ejh]

And you've changed your mind?

[dsquared]

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=BAY.L&t=5d

looks like BA shareholders didn't see it coming

Ferrovial shareholders might have done - harder to say as the Spanish market has been divebombing generally

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=FER.MC&t=5d

[ejh]

Probably because a lot of construction companies have suddenly decided to go bust overnight. There are supposed to be some bizarre number of empty homes here - you hear figures like three million, which surely can't be true, but then again I've been living surrounded by building sites for my two years here, and that there are unoccupied new flats all over town.

Anyway there was some item on the news a couple of nights ago about these construction firms, involving half-finished projects suddenly being abandoned, suppliers unpaid, workers likewise (even assuming they normally bothered to pay the immigrants workers in the first place). By the way, it's the practice here, where new homes are concerned, for the customer to pay the constructor in advance for their shiny new flat. So there are a fair few scandals in the making here, not that that's exceptional for the construction sector anywhere and least of all in Spain.