What? They're cancelling flights again!

What a crock! Yup, in part of the continuing saga related to the complete failure of their Navitaire 'New Skies' booking system two weeks ago Virgin Blue is cancelling more flights.

I talked about the planned downtime in a post on Monday, This really is Virgin on the Ridiculous, which as you can read there seems to be a terrible display of system and software engineering that makes me a little ashamed to be in the industry. The need to cancel flights screams to me that Virgin Blue still hasn't got a good backup check-in and booking system organised. While apparently they've accommodated everyone

 "...on other flights and they will depart within an hour of their original departure time."

I am curious why they couldn't with a week or so notice fix the problems associated with speed of check-in in their manual backup process to the point where they didn't need to cancel any flights what so ever. Perhaps it is purely a cost saving exercise, there being no point to fly the extra flights, but given that they usually have these extra flights running and presumably full enough to justify, it seems that it is because they expect delays in the "manual" check-in system again.

So as this saga continues we continue to see flaws in both Virgin Blue and Navitaire, no system switch over should take 32 hours but really Virgin Blue should be able to handle the normal flight load on their backup system with advanced notice to bring in extra staff etc.