BA flight disruption to cost $102m
LONDON: Three days of flight disruption at British Airways (BA) due to a massive computer crash last month will cost the airline an estimated £80 million ($102 million), its parent company said.
“Initial assessment of the gross cost of the disruption is in the order of £80 million,” Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways owner IAG (International Airlines Group), told a shareholders’ meeting in Madrid.
“British Airways is working hard to ensure that affected passengers are compensated as soon as possible,” he said.
The airline canceled 726 flights worldwide between May 27 and 29.
Some 75,000 passengers were affected.
The disruption caused chaos on a busy holiday weekend at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports.
Walsh has suggested that human error could be to blame after an engineer disconnected and then reconnected a power supply to the British Airways data center in “an uncontrolled and uncommanded fashion.”
“You could cause a mistake to disconnect the power — it’s difficult for me to understand how you can mistakenly reconnect the power,” Walsh told an industry conference in Mexico, according to comments published by The Guardian newspaper last week.
He also vowed that an independent investigation would be carried out.
The airline boss said “physical damage to the servers and distribution panels” was caused, making it difficult for BA to overcome the power outage quickly.
And Walsh added that the technician was “authorized to be in the room, but wasn’t authorized to do what he did.”
In another development, Europe’s biggest airport London Heathrow said that an issue preventing bags from being checked in at terminals 3 and 5 had been resolved and apologized to those passengers who had to fly without luggage on early morning flights.
Heathrow, which suffered massive disruption last month when a power surge knocked out British Airways’ IT system, said bag drop desks were now operating normally. Terminals 2 and 4 had not been affected by the issue.
“We recommend that passengers who have already departed on flights this morning without their baggage contact their airline for further updates,” it said on Twitter.
“We are sorry to passengers affected by this issue.”
Heathrow had earlier said that some passengers would have to travel without their bags and urged passengers to pack essential items in their hand luggage.