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As bad as the Aloha Airlines passenger jet shutdown has been in Hawaii - see yesterday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin for some details -  British Airways is facing a much larger problem with its new Terminal 5 in London’s Heathrow Airport. How bad is it?

The British Airways web site has a graphic on almost every page that says “We’re sorry”, and BA CEO Willie Walsh may be out of a job soon. Maybe BA executives shouldn’t have thrown that opening day party, as Jeff Nolan discussed here.

BA has called in FedEx to help deal with an estimated 28,000 bags because the entire bag handling system failed. Bags that were headed the the European continent have been diverted to Milan for sorting, according to this BBC article. See the BBC, Wired, Business Week and Bloomberg for more details.

Reliability is a key success factor

Air travelers want to get their baggage at their destination. BA has had baggage handling problems for years, according to an 21 August 2007 Wall Street Journal article.

This BBC article reveals that baggage handling personnel could not find parking spaces and were standing in line waiting for assignments as the bags started piling up. Workers struggled to use a scheduling system that should have assigned them to specific areas of the massive terminal, based upon flight activity and traffic patterns. A system that should have handled 12,000 bags per hour failed on its first morning because the staff didn’t know where to go in their new workplace.

The new £4.3 billion terminal, which was dedicated earlier this month and built specifically for BA, was supposed to help matters. Now thousands of travelers are marooned in Heathrow and neighboring hotels because the airline has canceled flights for the fifth consecutive day, according to another Bloomberg article. The BBC article said that 250 flights were canceled in the first 4 days alone.

Quite a shock

For those stranded in the new terminal, it’s a bit boring. BA does offer free WiFi in its Terminal 5 lounges, according to Jaunted. BoingBoing noted on 19 January 2008 that electrical outlets are hard to find in the new terminal. All in all, it’s worse than being fumigated in your seat.

The Washington Post reported yesterday on allegations that US Customs agents have inspected and confiscated laptop computers, iPods, and mobile phones during passenger inspections. Passengers claim they were asked to provide passwords and open files. In some cases, mobile phones were inspected and returned with purged call logs. One person claims their laptop has been held for an over a year.

According to this article, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus have filed a civil lawsuit against the Federal Government, based on 20 complaints from Northern California residents. The goal is disclosure of the US government’s boder search policies. One sourse of concern is an apparent pattern of racial profiling, in which agents targeted Asian and Muslim passengers.

The US Department of Justice asserts that electronic equipment falls into the same category as a briefcase, and may be searched and confiscated for inspection.

However, the scenarios described in this article sound more like coercion or out-and-out robbery.

Of course, many corporate travelers have confidential or private information on their computers and phones. The Post article cites a Canadian law firm that sends corporate travelers headed to the United States with “empty hard drives”. There’s an operating system and a web browser on the laptop, of course, but employees access their email and documents through a secure Internet connection such as a virtual private network (VPN). This helps keep confidential data off the drive, as the law firm fears discovery by search more than a hacked Internet connection.

BoingBoing and the Consumerist each had articles about the Post report, although both blogs misidentified US Customs as the TSA.

Sadly, the activities alleged in this lawsuit do not surprise me. BusinessWeek recently reported on Indian IT outsourcing firms that have systematically underpaid IT workers who were brought to the United States on H1-B visas. These workers make tempting targets, as their outsourcing companies can send the workers back home for any reason. By the time some workers determined they would never get their back-pay, they were no longer in the US. It seems that only a few lawyers or client companies will step in to help these guest workers.

According to Reuters, paper airline tickets will be phased out by June 1, 2008. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has placed its last order for blank paper tickets. Almost every airline uses IATA tickets when an international traveller requests paper tickets. I still have a few paper ticket stubs that I’ve saved. They’re in a box, with some old postage stamps and punch cards.

The airlines have been preparing for a full conversion to e-tickets, so this news was not a big surprise. Even so, there will always be some travelers who will be shocked when their airline or travel agent doesn’t given them a paper ticket.

Skype, the popular peer-to-peer VoIP service owned by eBay, was unavailable yesterday. Long-standing errors in Skype’s client software shut down the company’s supernodes, which took down the entire service. See this New York Times article for more background.

Convenience is all about timing

eWeek reported today that Skype is slowly coming back up, but millions of users are still unable to access the service.

Skype is releasing situation reports on its blog – here is the most recent post.

eBay had moved its North American office telephones from landlines to Skype, which didn’t help matters much yesterday. I discussed some of the business reasons behind this decision on December 13.

For eBay and many small companies that had based their telecommunications strategy in Skype, yesterday was a bitter lesson about redundant systems and failover. As two analysts noted in the eWeek article, Skype is not a landline replacement. The Financial Times pointed out today that disappointed Skype users may go back to less convenient, more reliable options.

Reliability is valuable

Systems will fail. Skype had four years to fix the problem that emerged yesterday. At Los Angeles International Airport last weekend, 20,000 passengers were stranded when a single network interface card (NIC) on a workstation caused a major LAX network to crash within 70 minutes. See SlashGear, CrunchGear and Consumerist for more details.

Bloggers including Mark Evans and Allen Stern discussed one interesting reswult of the outage – it really does appear that Skype matters.

Last Saturday we took a tour of the Superferry, and I took a few pictures for this blog. The Alakai arrived in Honolulu in early July and remains docked at Pier 19 while the Coast Guard does its final inspections of the vessel. About 4000 people participated in the event, according to this article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

The main cabin is spacious and well-lit. The cafe section has plenty of tables. Voyages can range from 4 to 6 hours, and that’s plenty of time to grab a snack and talk story.

Most of the interior seating in the main cabin is located away from the windows. There are flat-screen displays mounted throughout the cabin. During the tour, the monitors showed a video that must have been shot while the Alakai sailed to Honolulu. On a regular voyage, the monitors will display interesting ocean sights captured by the ship’s video cameras.

There is a spacious first-class cabin on the bow. It costs an extra US$20 a seat. I wonder if the Superferry’s staff will be diligent about keeping the main cabin customers out of the premium areas. I’ve rarely seen flight attendants tell people to return to the main cabin, although that warning is a standard part of the safety briefing these days.

Plenty of amenities, but there’s something missing

First class is the only place where I saw accessible AC outlets, and these were few and far between. We saw perhaps 4 or 5 work carrels in this cabin. At least the few outlets that we found didn’t have a meter attached to them, as they now do at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Anyone who wants to watch a movie on their laptop needs to board the Superferry early or make sure they charged their battery.

There’s no evidence that the Superferry will offer Internet access during voyages, either.

According to an article in yesterday’s Honolulu Advertiser, two court cases regarding the ferry’s environmental impact are due to be heard soon.

While I’m glad we got a chance to see the Alakai, it seems that the Superferry’s management had planned for a smaller event:

1. There were no souvenirs available. No free pens. No t-shirts. No hats. Even the boat’s gift shop was closed! This seems like a missed opportunity to get the brand and logo out to the most interested members of the public.
2. The boat seemed short-staffed. Most of the employees were leading very quick tours of the vessel. It was hard to find anyone who could answer a question or two.
3. While the Superferry is taking reservations online and by telephone, I couldn’t find anyone who was taking Superferry reservations during the event. All those willing customers right on board the boat, and no money changing hands?
4. There is no passenger parking at Pier 19. If you want to ride the Superferry without taking your car on board, then take a cab or have a friend drop you at the pier. I hope that the Superferry adds those tips to their walk-on passengers page soon. Most of the tour groups were shuttled in from downtown Honolulu courtesy of the Superferry, and a shuttle service from a remote parking lot might be a good side business.
5. I didn’t see any rental car counters at Pier 19. Perhaps riders should call Enterprise if they need a rental car to pick them up!