Asia-Pacific carrier Virgin Blue is likely to face tense talks with its IT supplier Navitaire after a system meltdown grounded aircraft and passengers again.
The latest incident began early yesterday (Sunday 26 Sept) when a hardware failure and subsequent outage of the airline’s internet booking, reservations, check-in and boarding systems affected around 50,000 passengers and 400 flights.
The airline's check-in and online booking systems were not fully operational until around 21 hours later, in the early hours of today.
Predictably the airline is not at all happy and has singled out Navitaire for criticism.
Officials say:
"We are advised by Navitaire that while they were able to isolate the point of failure to the device in question relatively quickly, an initial decision to seek to repair the device proved less than fruitful and also contributed to the delay in initiating a cutover to a contingency hardware platform."
Virgin Blue has also highlighted how its service agreement with Navitaire requires "mission critical system outages" to be sorted out within a short period of time.
"This did not happen in this instance," an official statement says pointedly. The airline says it was assured by Navitaire that the incident is being investigated thoroughly.
However, this is not the first time Navitaire is facing tough questions from the same customer.
Just three months ago, shortly after a widely puffed overhaul of the system by Navitaire, reservation systems failed for several hours, once again causing delays and disruption at Australian airports.
Accenture-owned Navitaire is staying extremely tight lipped about the latest failure of its IT systems, refusing to comment at all today from either its Australian and US bases.
In fact, communication ended when Navitaire was asked to simply acknowledge that the incident took place.
In October 2009, Air New Zealand suffered a similar incident when an IBM-run IT system failed and the airline experienced massive disruption across its network.