The Buck Stops With Me

It hasn’t been as it was envisaged.

The opening of a new terminal at the world’s most famous hub has been famed for notorious problems.

Delays, IT infrastructure problems, baggage bottlenecks, missing baggage, sending baggage to Milan for sorting to the recent reports of even burning baggage that cannot be reconciled with its rightful owners are the headlines that have plagued London Heathrow Airport’s new Terminal 5.

There have even been incidents where BA staff have walked “off the job” in frustration at the troubles they face in not being able to do their job.

While British Airways has highlighted the woes will cost anywhere in the region of £16m, some analysts have pegged the cost at closer to £40m or even more.

Image courtesy of The Telegraph

Already, the hounds are out, baying for blood. The blood of the CEO, Willie Walsh.

Getting rid of Walsh will not solve the problems the airline currently faces. Any successor would face the same problems Walsh does now.

The pilots union BALPA, are still unhappy with the way the new offshoot airline, OpenSkies will operate, staff morale in the company is not exactly boding well while at the same time, the airline battles to keep check of its cost base, which it has thus far managed to slash under the previous guidance of former CEO, Rod Eddington.

In an interview with the BBC, Walsh was unequivocal that “the buck stops with me and I’m determined to make this work” and that it was “not our finest hour” in view of the calamities passengers faced on the opening day.

Equally important is BAA’s role in this litany of errors at this flagship terminal. Where BA has been left to face angry customers, behind the scenes, BAA is being lambasted for its awful simulations that BA had relied so heavily upon.

The simulations during testing did not account for events such baggage belts breaking down and the IT systems redundancy was clearly not as robust as envisaged by both BA and BAA, who jointly hold responsibility for the development of PC workstations around the terminal. It’s symptomatic of a simple system overload- too many network users doing too many (variable) things causing it to crash.

Neither is the system geared up (yet) to cope with the 12,000 bags an hour that BAA had vaunted so much to the media. Add to that people checking in and adding bags to the Fast Bag Drop areas in the terminal and the result was a classic system bottleneck.

Perhaps at an operational level, there are indeed personnel that need to be relieved of their duties for poor management decisions - blaming the public face of BA in Walsh may just prove to be a rash move, although there are very few in the City who believe he will be jettisoned any time soon if at all.

Removing Walsh may just be another mistake.

5 comments April 14th, 2008