[14113]

Speaking as someone who (for a time) worked in the IT department of British Airways, the culprit is really just ancient systems that aren't well maintained, along with institutional and industrial pressure not to improve them or upgrade them.

For example, I worked as part of the team that managed the software that allowed pilots to submit flight plans. Any upgrades had to go through multiple weeks of reviews and testing (I don't mean code review - I mean reviews through managers and processes), and was run on some rather ancient hardware. Moreover, thanks to pressure from the pilots union, the system had to be able to accept flight plans by fax, so had a lot of legacy cruft to support that too.

The problem isn't agility, corner cutting or moving too fast - it's moving too slow.

[t0mas88]

As a pilot, I'm really sorry about the state of infrastructure at the destinations, but we need fax or phone sometimes.

For context: Imagine a crew room, with an old yellow looking windows 95 machine as the only "IT service" and only GSM-speed (or no reception at all) mobile internet in the area. The machine doesn't really work, or is on a dialup connection (yes this still exists).

These are the cases where we use the phone, or write the plan manually on a form and fax that. The phone has a high risk of mistakes, because you're reading lots of numbers and codes so it's easy to misunderstand one.

[14113]

That's a much more reasonable explanation - thanks, I appreciate it! The way I'd had it explained to me was more along the lines of "greedy pilots want to be able to fax because they can't be bothered to learn how to use email", but your explanation makes a lot more sense.

[CaptainZapp]

But any network airline has the same legacy issue and needs to connect to the same, relatively ancient, reservation systems.

Of all major metwork carriers it really seems to be BA with an annual complete shitshow of their IT systems.

[14113]

Well maybe the other carriers have less awful legacy tech - I can't speak for what they have. All I know is what I saw while working at BA.