Shownotes Transcript
Now, at the moment, I think one of the biggest problems that we are facing is at Sydney Airport right now, and especially at the departures...
We'll be right back.
Good afternoon, Chris. It's very much a tale of two terminals. The Qantas terminal, the automatic kiosks for check-in are not working, so they are checking in manually. One or two of the lanes are open, and as I mentioned earlier, the flights are leaving, and there are some delays. It's a mess, as one Qantas terminal
Staff have said to me, but traffic is getting in and out on the quarter side. Here on the Jetstar side, totally different. So no check-in luggage being accepted at all. So the queues are starting to – they're not outside yet, but they're certainly forming towards being outside the terminal.
One person I spoke to, a couple of young kids trying to get to Adelaide, they've just not moved for an hour. If you don't have check-in luggage, you are getting through screening here, but then there are delays for flights once you're through. But no luggage is being checked in, so that's gridlock. Uber tells me, talking to one of the Uber drivers, he said, yeah, my maps are not playing up. All my maps are going crazy. What's going on?
Taxi driver said the same thing. He said, I've got no maps, but my meter's working, so I'm happy. And the other interesting thing, walking through security screening at Qantas,
The big entry into the airport where you go through, you're getting laptops out and things, they had no idea. They weren't aware of any disruption. When I spoke to the lady, I think she thought I was a bit crazy and I explained, oh, there's a computer outage. Oh, I know nothing about that. We're working fine. That's the Qantas site.
Jetstar side, different story. Debacle. I was just looking at some pictures coming through. I think it was on Sky News. So Jetstar says effectively they can't fly at the moment. Is that your understanding, Burnsy? Well, certainly they're not taking any check-in luggage. I'm not able to go through yet to see what the boards look like on the check-in side. On the outside of the airport, the screens are all blank. Mm-hmm.
There's no flight arrival or departure information at all. And, you know, this time on a Friday afternoon, school holidays, I'm looking at a school group at the moment. There must be 30 kiddies all lined up in fluorescent beanies. It's all a bit exciting, but they could be in for a bit of a wait.
How is the traffic around the airport? Does it seem okay? Well, it did seem all right. And the taxi queue, we mentioned earlier that there's no problem with taxis. There seemed on the Qantas side to be – it didn't seem like a normal Friday afternoon, whether that's school holidays. The airport this time of day coming in is certainly ordinarily a lot busier than what it is.
I can't stress enough that you walk across the road and come into this terminal, T2, and it's a very, very different story to what's going on at Qantas. Isn't it strange that Qantas and Jetstar... Well, Jetstar is owned by Qantas, so presumably they'd have...
the same software providers in CrowdStrike. So it's curious that Qantas seems to be tickety-boo, albeit you can't collect checked-in luggage. You can't do your own, you know, those automatic kiosks. They're all offline. But there are people, a couple of manual operators there taking luggage, and they said to me, oh, yeah, there's some delays, but take your luggage up to that end. Where are you going? But here...
Jetstar side, as far as check-in luggage, nothing. It's just stopped. People are sitting down. Kitties are lying down. One person had told me they'd been there for three-quarters of an hour. Their flight was not due for another 10, 15 minutes, but they resigned that it's going to be sort of a late night. As we know, Chris, these things can turn around fairly quickly once systems are back up and running.
But there's no indication of that happening at the moment. No, there's not. And it's funny, you know, we've got a lot of issues. We had a lot of issues at the start when all of this started to unfold.
with banks and financial platforms, they seem to be resolved pretty quickly. And that makes me think that potentially it was the IST systems and, you know, a lot of these banks that have IT departments and engineers, really well-resourced departments to look after things like that. Maybe they've organised workarounds rather than the CrowdStrike issue resolving itself slowly.
Yeah, I've just come, I'm just on the Qantas side now and a couple of bags are being checked manually. Looking at Jetstar, there appears to be none being checked manually. Just let me try. Excuse me, man, so you're Rex, you're checking luggage. How are your flights at present?
Everything's going out. It doesn't affect us. It doesn't affect Rex? Okay, Chris, so Rex Airlines is not affected. Okay. Good work, Burnsy. See you, bye. You sound like you've been a radio reporter at some point in your life. Greg Burns there. He's the boss. He's the head of content here at Nine Radio at Sydney Airport. So T2 is a debacle. It doesn't look like it's too bad on the Qantas side. Rex...
Not affected, eh? Rex, happy days.
