Denver Airport Fiasco Presentation

Timeline

I will start by finishing up the timeline.

* In April 1994, the airport authorities organize a demonstration of the system for the media without informing BAE. It’s a disaster as clothes are ejected from crushed bags. As a result, the mayor of Denver is forced to delay the opening for the fourth time.

* In May of the same year, BAE says the system is fine and that most of the problems are caused by the airport staff using the system incorrectly. The problems persist as testing continues so the airport builds a manual tug and trolley system instead.

* In august, the City of Denver starts fining BAE 12 thousand dollars per day for further delays.

* The airport finally opens on February 28th 1995 using part of the BAE system and a manual tug and trolley.

* Finally, in 2005, the system fully scrapped for the manual one.

Software Issues

Next I will discuss the main software issues.

* One of the system’s big problems was that carts were late to pick up bags, destabilizing the whole chain. This was, in part, due to the mathematical nightmare that represented the development of a line-balancing algorithm to feed carts at more than 100 pickup points.

* It was also due to the fact that BAE’s codes expected perfect behavior from the system components. They didn’t allow for proper margins of error. The components were expected to perform better than they did.

* Another major cause of software problems was that BAE’s software had to communicate with the software of each airline. This led to bugs and errors caused by the translation between different software languages.

* As the code was being written and algorithms were being developed, the software grew much more complicated than anticipated, becoming increasingly hard to track and understand making error fixing very challenging for programmers.

Decisional Issues

Those are errors made by the project management team.

* After two years, with only two more years to go before the planned opening, the project management team decided to take back the responsibility of each airline to build it’s own baggage handling system in order to build the automatic airport wide system. Had they made this decision two years earlier, the project would not have been under the same excessive schedule pressure. These two years could have allowed designers to understand the complexity of the project more deeply, to find ways to overcome that or even just agree on a simpler design.

* A second decisional issue is that despite all the clues showing there was too little time to complete the full-scale project, they still proceeded with it. For example, during the request for proposals, none of the vendors said they could meet the deadline. Furthermore, experts from the Munich airport in Germany advised that their much simpler system had taken 2 full years to build and that it had run 24 / 7 for 6 months prior to opening to allow bugs to be ironed out.

* The airlines were excluded from many meetings between BAE and the project management team that discussed topics for which they were clear stakeholders. This led to many change requests in the system later on that the team was forced to accept. Once again, poor managerial decisions had added schedule pressure to the project. The most major changes were the addition of ski equipment racks, the addition of maintenance tracks to allow carts to be serviced without being removed from the rails and changes to the handling of oversized baggage.

* The building was fully designed before the system. So they had to work within the constraints of that design and couldn’t tweak it to solve issues. Hence the baggage system had to accommodate sharp turns that were far from optimal and increased the physical loads placed on the system causing bags to be ejected from their carts. Consequently, the operation speed of the system had to be halved.

* Walter Slinger, the chief airport engineer died in 1992. His leadership and engineering knowledge was much needed to the project. According to reports, the person they chose to replace him did not show the same expertise. Yet, they let him preserve identical responsibilities.

Conclusion

* In sum, the Denver airport suffered from :

The bright side of the story is that the airport did eventually open and despite using a largely manual trolley based system, the airport proved to be an operational success. Fears that a manual system would be too slow to service an airport this big were actually unfounded.