Delays for Qantas passengers

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The plans of thousands of Australian air travellers have been thrown into chaos at airports Australia-wide this morning, after another outage with check-in systems at Qantas.

Queues of disgruntled passengers snaked through the Qantas terminals in Australia, many of whom vented their anger via social-networking site Twitter.

"Yep. Qantas Melbourne major queues. It's crazy ... expect HUGE delays ..." one passenger wrote this morning.

Another wrote: "Onboard Qantas aircraft waiting for missing pax who can't check-in as system is down... 30mins has passed. I say stuff them... take off!"

And another: "Qantas' system down for 2hrs in Sydney = chaos and irritation. Just want to go home guys. Qantas fail."

A Qantas spokesman confirmed there was an intermittent outage with check-in systems this morning between 8.25am and 9.30am.

The global system, called Amadeus, is now working again but delays of up to an hour are still expected until mid-afternoon.

Three international departures were affected by delays up to 40 minutes.

"It's an Amadeus server issue that meant that our check-in system was only intermittently available between 8.25am and 9.30am this morning," a Qantas spokesman said.

"The similar issue would have been experienced by other airlines globally using the same Amadeus system.

"We'll certainly be talking to Amadeus [management] and seeking assurances today's issue will be addressed." When the check-in systems fail, passengers and their baggage have to be processed manually, an alternative that causes knock-on delays to flight schedules.

"As a result of manual processes obviously taking a little longer than traditional quick check-in processes [there were] delays up to an hour on the first wave of [Australian] services affected," the Qantas spokesman said.

"We expect to experience delays into mid-afternoon."

A Melbourne Airport spokeswoman said the international terminal, T2, was functioning normally.

It's the latest blow to hit air travellers at the busiest time of the year.

Virgin Blue travellers suffered extensive disruption to schedules and thousands of travellers were inconvenienced when a Telstra cable was severed two weeks ago, stopping the flow of computer data.

Qantas suffered another meltdown with Amadeus's system in November.

- © Fairfax NZ News