I'll try and paraphrase based on what I've read from BA's company-wide magazine, but I think a lot of it has been said already.

BA's existing system for customer management and departure control is called cDCS/PRS - you might have seen it on staff computers. It's essentially a character-based system with a blue or green background - think MS DOS! The system hails from the 1960s and has obviously been tweaked and upgraded over the years but it's old, outdated and not user- or customer-friendly.

BA is switching to an Amadeus system called Altéa, which has lots of different modules for flight-related tasks. It's not just at the airport that the system is going to be introduced, non-airport functions including reservations will be using it. I recently spent a day at Network Ops at Waterside and time with Central Load Control (CLC), who manage aircraft loading - they're already using the Altéa module for aircraft loading, for example.

FLY is the front-end of the new Amadeus system for departure control and customer management, customised by BA for the airline with input and testing from customer service staff. The new system has a web-style interface and is supposed to be more user-friendly and intuitive. There are specific flows for certain procedures and in normal circumstances, it's all a case of tapping ENTER and the system guides staff through the flow in a logical sequence, asking for information where required. Everything is colour-coded too and the system, and indeed the Altéa system in general, automates a lot of the work. The idea is that staff spend less time staring their computer screens and more time interacting with the customer, in order to deliver the BA service hallmarks. cDCS/PRS is also a flight-based system, whereas FLY is customer-based - you look up a customer and on your screen there are tabs of pages of different information, including details of a customer's history with the airline. When it comes to boarding, one screen in FLY will show the information from seven different screens in the existing PRS.

It's going to be a staged rollout, yet one aspect of the system is that once a flight is "created" in FLY, it is no longer accessible on the old system, which may lead to difficulties dealing with inbound flights from outstations already using FLY. Heathrow and Gatwick will switch sometime next year.

And, on a day like today, FLY should come in handy too: in disruption, staff will be able to rebook customers onto the next BA flight with one keystroke, rather than the current eight or nine...

Hope that's helpful!