Engineer’s error may have caused IT chaos admits BA

● Airline chief reveals likely cause of 75,000 passengers’ woes

The British Airways IT shutdown which left 75,000 bank holiday travellers stranded may have been caused by human error, airline boss Willie Walsh has suggested.

Mr Walsh, chief executive of BA owner International Airlines Group (IAG), said the actions of an engineer who disconnected and then reconnected a power supply to the data centre in “an uncontrolled and uncommanded fashion” may be central to a newly ordered independent investigation.

Mr Walsh, who was at the International Air Transport Association global summit in Mexico, said: “You could cause a mistake to disconnect the power, it’s difficult for me to understand how you can mistakenly reconnect the power.”

He said “physical damage to the servers and distribution panels” was caused which made it difficult for BA to quickly overcome the power outage.

Mr Walsh suggested this “in itself was a problem that we could have overcome probably in a couple of hours, I don’t think it would have led to any cancellations”.

Of the fed-up passengers who complained they had been left to queue before leaving Heathrow Airport, he said: “I wouldn’t suggest for one minute we got communications right at BA, we didn’t.”

The carrier was unable to resume a full schedule until the following Tuesday.

Mr Walsh, who was BA’S chief executive before taking charge of its parent company, defended cost-cutting measures. BA was accused of greed after the GMB union suggested that the issue could have been prevented if the airline had not cut “hundreds of dedicated and loyal” IT staff and contracted the work to India last year.

Mick Rix, national officer of the GMB union, said: “What appears to be the selective dribbling out by IAG of what happened is only adding to the confusion.

“This latest admission only reinforces what GMB has maintained throughout, that once a problem developed, the ability to recover was hugely hampered by the lack of experienced BA IT staff whose jobs and functions had been outsourced.”

0 Willie Walsh admitted human error could have caused problems