In this day and age, airport information glitches are unacceptable
- If there is an IT problem, the Hong Kong Airport Authority should be able to maintain separate flows of updated information through website and app services
To be caught once without a contingency or backup plan to maintain an essential international public service can be a salutary lesson. To be caught twice within a week is downright embarrassing. It shows the Hong Kong Airport Authority needs to take the lesson to heart, urgently. We are referring, first, to the recent closure of a runway for eight hours after a cargo plane burst a tyre on landing, delaying hundreds of flights; second, to the failure of flight-information screens, including the Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) website, to update on Sunday because of a computer glitch.
The first instance prompted a chorus of reminders, including from this newspaper, that proper contingency plans are vital to the safe and efficient operation of a modern aviation hub. It led to calls, rightly, for an urgent review of Hong Kong airport’s preparedness.
Admittedly, a week after the first instance was hardly enough time to review everything, even if airport officials got the message. But if anything more is needed to focus their minds, CCTV images of manually updated flight information whiteboards and passengers scrambling to board their flights should be sufficient. Not all of them made it on time.
The runway closure could have passed swiftly from travellers’ minds. But coming on top of that, the information outage brought back memories of the baggage chaos that marred the opening of the airport in 1998.
It hardly seems credible that it could now be beset with such operational problems, just when it is striving to fully recover its position as an international aviation hub following the damaging pandemic shutdown.
A whiteboard, however diligently updated, is hardly a 21st-century contingency or backup plan. If there is an IT problem at the airport, the authority should be able to maintain separate flows of updated information through website and app services. Anything less is unacceptable when the city is investing so many resources into efforts to revive tourism, a pillar of Hong Kong’s economy.
That said, in fairness to HKIA, it has to be acknowledged that many arrivals during the information outage did not find the airport all that disrupted by the IT glitch, compared with their experience at some European airports, especially in the Balkans where an early summer heatwave has caused power outages.
In that regard, it may be argued that the situation at the airport was not all that chaotic. Indeed credit is due to airport authorities and airlines for efforts to ensure that not that many people missed their flights. But luck plays a part. The city may count itself lucky to have escaped more serious chaos and disruption.
