AUSTRALIAN AIRPORTS: Tech issues delay international take offs

It sometimes takes only one thing to stuff up a whole process.

The Guardian is reporting that Australian Border Force (ABF) employees have had to revert to manual processing of outbound passengers because of a technical outage of the usual system they use.

The manual processing of outbound passengers across Australia leaving the country has meant that things are moving very slowly. This is expected to cause delays to international flights leaving in the afternoon and evening on Thursday 6 July.

The disruption is particularly affecting Melbourne. Sydney and Brisbane are also affected but seem to be coping better with the additional work of manual processing, given the number of flights and passengers out of Australia this evening.

‘The outage has meant the ABF’s passenger screening information is not being communicated to desks where airlines are checking in passengers, forcing checks to be done manually.’

The Guardian, Australia

The cause is an outage affecting the external service provider of the Advanced Passenger Processing systems (APP), used by Border Force to process outgoing passengers. The ABF is pulling in additional staff to assist with the manual processing.

2PAXfly Takeout

So if you are travelling internationally today, especially out of Melbourne, expect delays, and plan accordingly. If you have tight connections, I’d be contacting your airline or travel agent for advice.

These sorts of outages are highly annoying but seem common. Let’s hope that there are enough Border Force staff on call with familiarity with the manual processing of passengers.

I hope that by the tiime you read this, the issue will be solved, and international departures have returned to their usual organised chaos.