Flight chaos: BA systems still grounded

Despite claims last week that the problem would be fixed within three days flights were still being delayed today and the company has now admitted the problem will persist into the middle of this week.

The problems have caused delays of up to 40 minutes for long haul passengers and 30 minutes for short flights.

A spokesman for BA said: "As each day goes by it gets a little better. We've been working around the clock but are still expecting operational problems today."

The airline's problems began last Tuesday after a maintenance upgrade of the passenger departure control system failed, according to an anonymous posting on Pprune.com - an airline pilot chatroom.

BA claimed the failure stemmed from the crash of links connecting various systems, such as baggage handling, into the main departure control system.

Flights were affected on Thursday night, including the cancellation of three flights from Terminal 4, and passengers scheduled to fly to Vancouver were put up in a hotel over night. As the problem dragged into Saturday, passengers continued to be checked in manually, delaying 100 flights by at least 45 minutes.

Another anonymous Pprune contributor claimed to have wangled a Club Class seat on a BA flight after the company's e-ticketing system went down."The harried check-in staff had to take my word that I did have a Club Class seat," it said.

Another contributor wrote: "The BA incident is inexcusable. Surely there were rigorous acceptance tests before migrating the system? Another sign of BA losing it?"