BA passengers around the world were struck by a second day of cancellations and delays on Sunday as the airline struggled to regain control after a computer system failure caused chaos during one of the busiest travel weekends of the year in the UK. Nearly a third of BA flights departing from Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport, had been cancelled by Sunday afternoon, while inbound fights from destinations such as New York and Austin, Texas, were also scrapped, leaving passengers stranded. Aviation experts predicted the disruption would spill over into the week as BA fought to recover from the major IT crash, which forced it to cancel all flights out of London on Saturday. It was one of the worst IT failures to strike a global airline. Last year when Delta Air Lines suffered a similar outage. 2,300 flights were cancelled and delays took three days to clear. “Coming after a spate of other issues, the bad PR and potential reputational aftermath will probably hit future revenues” at BA, which is part of the IAG airlines group, said Damian Brewer, analyst at RBC Capital Markets. BA had been hoping to resume a “near normal” service out of Gatwick airport Sunday and operate a “majority” of scheduled flights from Heathrow but passengers at the latter reported lengthy queues and over-crowding. Passengers at Heathrow were forced to wait outside terminal buildings until 90 minutes before their flight was due to depart, as airport and airline staff desperately sought to deal with the congestion. Alex Cruz, chief executive of BA, blamed the IT meltdown on a “power supply issue” but the carrier would not provide further details on why all of its systems, including back-up systems, had failed. It said on Sunday that many of its IT systems were “back up today and we are doing all we can to restore our flight programme”. Bill Curtis, senior vice-president at IT analytics firm CAST, questioned why a back-up system had not kicked in. “It [the back-up system] should have been on a different power supply with a replicated database. You would usually lose a few transactions but not the entire operation of the airline,” Curtis said.<br/>
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BA and Iberia are to follow Lufthansa by charging a fee for bookings via third parties, using new technology to take more control of their own bookings. The move will be a blow to global distribution systems (GDS) providers such as Amadeus IT Group, Travelport and Sabre, the share prices of which all fell on Friday. Amadeus and Travelport both dropped 4% while Sabre lost 1.7%. Lufthansa caused a stir in the industry when it introduced its own GDS surcharge in 2015 and CEO Carsten Spohr has repeatedly said he expects rival carriers to follow suit. "From what we hear in the industry, and with the visible success of Lufthansa, I'd be very surprised if others would not follow," he said in March. Airlines often have a tense relationship with GDS providers, which typically achieve much higher profit margins than the airlines themselves. BA and Iberia said that, from Nov. 1, fees of GBP8 or E9.50 will be levied on bookings not made via the airlines' own websites or direct sales channels. "We will continue to work with the GDS providers to distribute our content to valued agency partners via existing solutions. However, these systems and their traditional technology solutions currently carry significantly greater costs to BA and IB," the airlines said.<br/>
Finnair has been allowed to increase its flights from Helsinki to Asian destinations over Siberia according to a new deal between Russia and Finland, the ministry of transport and communications said on Friday. Finnair depends on attracting traffic flows between Europe and Asia to its Helsinki hub because of the relatively shorter distances flown, and the new deal increases the number of scheduled flights it can make over Siberia to 80 a week, from 65 currently. The ministry said the new rights meant Finnair can add routes to Japan, China and South Korea. "The agreement gives a good base for negotiations of commercial deals in the future," a Finnair spokesman said, but declined to specify plans. Finnair has struggled in recent years with tough competition from discount carriers, but cost savings and increased flights to Asia has helped it swing back into profit with the company paying its first dividend in April in four years. However, Finnair has repeatedly called on the government to open the door to mergers and acquisitions. It has urged the state, which owns 55.8% of Finnair, to scrap a clause that obliges it to hold a majority stake in the company.<br/>
A 22-year-old man jumped out of an airplane waiting to take off in North Carolina and had to be stopped from running onto the runway. A federal air marshal said in a sworn statement that 22-year-old Tun Sein was flying from Charlotte to New Bern on Thursday when he stood after the American Airlines flight had pulled away from the gate and was waiting to take off. Authorities say Sein ignored a flight attendant, then tried to bite her and fought off two passengers. He ran to the door, opened it and jumped out. An airport worker stopped him. Sein is charged with interference with a flight crew. <br/>