Third day of misery... but beleaguered BA boss refuses to quit
BRITISH Airways boss Alex Cruz refused to resign yesterday as holidaymakers suffered a third day of airport misery following the airline’s compuer system meltdown.
He insisted his departure would not help the 75,000 passengers who suffered delayed and cancelled flights in the Bank Holiday travel crisis.
The Spanish-born chief executive was accused of causing the catastrophe by switching some BA jobs abroad in an attempt to cut costs.
But he insisted his “outsourcing” of jobs from Britain to India had nothing to do with the airline’s computer system collapse.
Asked whether he will resign, he said: “I don’t think it would make much use for me to resign at this particular point in time.
“I am working very closely with my team to make sure we work on the rest of the disrupted passengers to address their needs.”
The former Clickair and Vueling airline supremo added: “All the parties involved around this particular event have not been involved in any type of outsourcing in any foreign country.
“They have all been local issues around a local data centre which has been managed and fixed by local resources.”
He added: “We will have completed an exhaustive investigation on exactly the reasons of why this happened.
“We will, of course, share those conclusions once we have actually finished them.”
The company, which faces compensation claims of up to £150million in the debacle, claimed it was running at “near-normal” capacity yesterday.
All BA flights from Gatwick Airport left without disruption but at Heathrow, the company expected to fly 95 per cent of its scheduled flights.
Both airports advised passengers to check the status of their flights before travelling. Inside Heathrow’s Terminal Five, the atmosphere was relatively calm, with many of the queues which built up over the weekend now cleared.
But display boards showed that some flights had been cancelled, including planes to Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Manchester and Dublin.
Weary-looking passengers filled several benches in departures, but the majority seemed to be passing through check-in smoothly.
The chaos was caused when a power failure on Saturday knocked out the system used to control BA’s flight traffic.
All services at the two main London airports were cancelled or delayed and travellers were forced to spend the night in terminals awaiting replacement flights.
Hundreds of victims slept on yoga mats spread on the floor and shops ran out of food due to the number of travellers stranded at meal times. Many of those who managed to fly arrived at their destination to find luggage missing, and domestic customers clogged up the rail network as they left to catch trains to their destination.
Yesterday Mick Rix, aviation official for the GMB union, insisted outsourcing was to blame – and claimed Prime Minister Theresa May was told about it when Home Secretary.
“This could have all been avoided,” he said.
“The GMB wrote to Theresa May on multiple occasions last year to warn of the security risks of British Airways outsourcing vital IT functions.
“She did not reply and instead chose to ignore the warnings from our members.
“Hundreds of IT jobs have been lost at BA already and hundreds more are set to go.
“This IT collapse and the failure to sort it out is a tragedy, but a tragedy that our members saw coming long ago.”