It's not been a good summer for consumer confidence in airlines' IT.
In July Southwest experienced a computer malfunction which led to several days of cancelled and postponed flights. In early August there was a major system outage at Delta Air Lines which caused system-wide flight delays and cancellations.
And on Monday British Airways experienced a computer 'glitch' which affected check-in systems in North America. This spread — some reports say the US and Europe; some say worldwide — causing widespread issues in checking in passengers and, consequently, extensive delays. At the time of writing the extent of the disruption is not clear. Nor is the cause.
We do know that Delta's global computer outage caused days of disruption and approximately 2,000 flight cancellations.
Delta's chief operating officer did try to explain. The statement said: "Monday morning a critical power control module at our Technology Command Center malfunctioned, causing a surge to the transformer and a loss of power. The universal power was stabilized and power was restored quickly. But when this happened, critical systems and network equipment didn't switch over to backups. Other systems did. And now we're seeing instability in these systems.
"For example we're seeing slowness in a system that airport customer service agents use to process check-ins, conduct boarding and dispatch aircraft. Delta agents today are using the original interface we designed for this system while we continue with our resetting efforts.
"Delta is a vast people-moving machine that is tightly wound around a schedule that meets customer demand. Similar to what happens after a severe weather event, it is not unusual for a global airline to take more than 24 hours to return to full reliability.
"We are sorry our technology failure inconvenienced so many customers and are grateful for the faith and patience so many have shown in Delta."
Without a doubt passengers have been inconvenienced by these carrier outages. There is also scepticism about what actually occurred and why. Delta and British Airways have not been wholly transparent about what specifically happened in each respective case and that is not surprising. System disruption is complicated and there is no industry standard for measuring it. And although carriers are keen to be perceived as open, complete honesty in such situations would probably not benefit any airline's reputation.
It is also not clear that carriers know exactly why there were these IT glitches and, importantly, how to prevent IT malfunctions in the future.
Buyers ask for KPIs from their various suppliers. Whatever the cause of airline disruption, the result can be missed meetings, flights, connections. And that has a cost.
And in these times of duty of care and corporate social responsibility there are real questions of security to be addressed. IT malfunctions can be caused by system failure. They can also be caused by system hacks.
Edward Snowden managed to copy NSA files so there is no reason to assume that airline systems are immune from hacks. Carriers can be vulnerable on the ground as much as up in the sky.
Perhaps another item to be added to the airline RFP?
After all, IAG's share price actually rose after this week's incident.