Irish Examiner View: Airport chaos has us falling off cloud nine

Air travel has become a wretched consumer experience, and technology isn't the panacea that some believe it to be.

Thousands of passengers in Terminal 2 at Dublin Airport as Aer Lingus flights scheduled to depart to and from Dublin Airport were cancelled, due to an ongoing IT problem at the airline. Picture: Sam Boal / RollingNews.ie

In recent years, much effort has been expended on the transfer to cloud-based network technologies.

Software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and as many acronyms as you can shake a length of old-fashioned cabling at, have been proclaimed as the future.

The downside to technology, and revolutionary concepts, is that when it goes wrong, the chaos can be spectacular, as it was at the weekend for Aer Lingus and Dublin Airport when “a major incident” saw 51 flights cancelled at short notice.

Passengers with bookings after 2pm on Saturday were told not to turn up as the outage brought down check-in and boarding systems and the airport website.

In a moment of hubris for digital disciples, earlier passengers were checked through manually, something that remains very common for travellers despite millions spent by the aviation industry on shiny new self-service passenger terminals and compulsory mobile apps supposed to speed us frictionlessly on our way.

The impetus to move to cloud-based services was accelerated by airports under the heading of “innovation”. 

The hope was to pare down queue times, provide passengers with real-time information, and make bag drops easier. Travel technology company Amadeus has forecast that 80% of airports will be operating in the cloud. 

Air travel has become a wretched consumer experience, with airport restrictions imposed by security and Covid management; increased bureaucracy; the failure to recruit or retain enough staff to manage the post-pandemic recovery; and an over-reliance on technology as a magic wand to solve the industry’s problems by increasing the stress level of customers. 

Patience is wearing very thin.