Hot & stucky
Passengers spend night on the floor as IT issue leaves BA in meltdown
BRITISH Airways flights from Scotland’s three main airports were grounded yesterday as the airline tried to get back in the air.
Thousands of Scots were caught in the chaos of BA’s ground systems IT failure, caused by a power supply problem.
The chaos affected check-in and operational systems, including customer service phone lines.
More than 100 flights, about a third of the total, in and out of the airline’s hub at Heathrow also continued to be affected.
The 9.25am from Glasgow and the 10.25am into Edinburgh and corresponding 11.35am flight south were grounded.
In Aberdeen, the 11.35am and 4.05pm due in from Heathrow were cancelled.
That meant the Aberdeen return flights to London were also unable to fly.
Passengers at Heathrow – given free water and snacks – described scenes of confusion and a lack of BA staff providing information. Many spent Saturday night stretched out on the floor.
Glasgow-bound travellers told yesterday how they were left stranded after the meltdown.
Businessman Alan McLeish, from Monkton, Ayrshire, was among the delayed.
He said an earlier leg of his journey, from Los Angeles to London, had been a nightmare.
Alan said: “When we got to LAX, it was pandemonium, there was no communication.
“We queued up for four hours at business class and their terminals kept on crashing.”
His wife Phyllis said they were delayed for three hours and Alan added: “We nearly missed the flight because we went to the One World lounge as we were told to, we spoke to the girl at the desk and she said, ‘Don’t worry, we will be announcing the flight in the lounge’.
“It just happened my wife went out to buy a book and she came running back to the lounge saying we are on final call for our flight. We had seven minutes to get to the departure gate.”
Robin Law, from Stirling, told how he tried in vain to use a BA computer to check the status of his re-booked flight to Edinburgh, which had been cancelled on Saturday.
He said: “There was such a lack of information it was unbelievable. There were queues but nobody knew what the queues were for.”
The company’s chief executive Alex Cruz had said it was believed “the root cause was a power supply issue”.
BA said there was no evidence the failure was the result of a cyber attack.
The GMB union said the failure could have been avoided had BA not outsourced their IT work.