[TheLion]

This house says he should go after this latest major disaster to befall BA.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40083778

Cruz has presided over the deepest cuts in BA’s history, gutting the airline to the bone, alienated staff and oasssengers alike and now oversees this latest major crisis that comes on the heels of multiple other bad PR incidents and system failures, all of which will cost the airline tens of millions and untold goodwill with their customers and exhausted staff.

What’s your view?

[AnthonyDunn]

In fairness (ahem) to CruzControl, the cuts regime predated his appointment by some years and the “cuts first, quality second” approach to BA’s brand management was well in place under WW.

It will be fascinating to see whether BA ever reveal what actually happened or whether NDAs apply because of their contractual relationship with Tata and then just how much they have to pay out by way of compensation. The latter point they cannot dodge declaring to the Stock Exchange via their Annual Report.

[Cedric_Statherby]

It used to be that to run a business you had to have a deep understanding of what the business did. But that has changed, and what you now need – in fact *all* you now need – is an understanding of the financials, and specifically how to save money.

Cruz appears to have a sounder grip on how to squeeze financials than any of the other parts of wht one might think his job contained, such as communication, management and staff relations, customer satisfaction.

Over-promoted bean-counters very seldom make the best CEOs. Time to get someone who knows about airlines …

[LuganoPirate]

He may not resign, but he may well be fired?

[seasonedtraveller]

He should do the decent thing. Time to fly CruzControl.

[canucklad]

I’ve heard that part of the Vueling deal with IAG was the placement of Cruz as BA’s top gun so to speak.
And you can’t blame the man for doing what he’s been told to do, and I might add, very successfully if you’re a shareholder.
Cost cutting at BA started well before Cruz arrived, it’s just that he’s very good at it.
Remember the Dutch guy that left because presumably he was too focussed on the customer experience!!

[capetonianm]

“And you can’t blame the man for doing what he’s been told to do, and I might add, very successfully if you’re a shareholder.”

Short term cost cutting may have seen the share price go up, and then the result of the cost cutting is a conservatively estimated £150m. disaster. That’s not a success by any measure and I am surprised that it has not had a greater impact on the share price.

I do blame him, not just as a BA shareholder but also as a past and potential future passenger, although it has been my policy for a long time to avoid BA, there are times when it is the least bad option. I also blame him for the appalling communications that have emanated from BA over this crisis, including his own abysmal and amateurish statements. He has the ultimate responsibility.

I hope that there will be some kind of shareholders’ group lobbying for Cruz’s removal. Se merece una patada en el culo.

[ImissConcorde]

capetonianm… “blame him for the appalling communications.
Note his communication to staff which starts “Guys”
Says it all really.

[Intheair]

I don’t have a clue as to why this happened, and it shouldn’t have happened. And I agree with nearly all the posters that BA’s PR since the event has been less than appalling.

However, what if this was a cybercrime? If it was BA might act in just the way they have done, as they would have major issues with admission of such a fact for a number of reasons, most logistical.

I think the real reason for the debacle may well come out, I’m not saying it was a cybercrime but the current explanation doesn’t wash. A major organisation like BA would have at least 6 layers of protection for its IT and cut offs to stop contagion between micro-IT systems.

[SimonS1]

Surely if it was a cybercrime you would have expected BA to have mentioned that quite quickly as a means of apportioning blame, mitigating the fallout (and avoiding compensation).

Of course the company should have layers of protection but clearly didn’t. The issues with ‘Fly’ earlier in the year which left long queues was a bit of an IT warning shot.

Unfortunately for BA I suspect the likely finding is that, outsourcing or not, corners have been cut to save money at the most successful airline in the world.

[FDOS_UK]

[quote quote=809896]

A major organisation like BA would have at least 6 layers of protection for its IT and cut offs to stop contagion between micro-IT systems.

[/quote]

Running data centres is not as easy as people think – just to give a flavour in the airline industry, I’ve searched around for the article I read earlier this year about the Delta outage in 2016.

Even though it was a known failure mode (in the industry), it still caught Delta and cost them into 9 figures. Needless to say, Delta is a lot larger airline than BA and yet they still got whacked.

We’re not talking about small business networks, here, this stuff is highly complex and the architecture is ‘country house’, rather than ‘techo’, due to the need to accommodate legacy systems.

At Scale, Rare Events aren’t Rare

I don’t wish to defend BA, but a lot of top firms have been caught by big data centre problems – it’s just that in the airline business, it is much higher profile news.

Edited to add: in the article, the switch gear is programmed to protect generators worth single figures of millions from damage, in the event of the problem being an internal ground fault – the author is a well respected expert in this area and it is difficult to argue with his logic that maybe there are more important things to protect, in this case like running the schedule.

Writing off another few million on top of 100+ is probably trivial , to be honest, so I’d go for a default of bringing the generators online, as a business decision.

[SimonS1]

[quote quote=809901]FDOS – I accept what you say and you may be right

SimonS1 – you are like a scratched record, and not a funny one at that. If you are too autistic to realise the purpose of me starting the thread about the success of BA or otherwise, that is your issue.

[/quote]

Well I’m assuming you are not a clairvoyant so didn’t start it to look deliberately silly. So just unfortunate timing I guess?

[Author]

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