‘The worst chaos I’ve ever seen’: Half term misery as BA disruption to continue for days
As thousands suffer delays in BA crisis, an airline captain took pity on a frail, stranded cancer sufferer
BRITISH AIRWAYS has presided over the worst airport chaos for decades, with disruption to continue for days, one of its own senior pilots admitted last night.
More than 100,000 passengers have had their half term and Bank Holiday travel plans thrown into chaos after a computer meltdown.
Many have had their flights cancelled, been separated from their luggage or been left stranded abroad as the airline struggles to recover from Saturday’s incident.
And BA – which faces a £50million compensation bill – has now warned travellers that it may be several days before normal service can resume.
It has been suggested that cost-cutting and the outsourcing of around 700 in-house IT jobs to India may have triggered the crisis.
Last night it emerged that the airline has refused offers of assistance from its own IT supplier to resolve the problem.
Captain Stephen Wearing, who has flown for BA for 29 years, last night described what greeted him when he flew into Heathrow at the weekend as “the worst chaos I’ve ever seen”.
He called the situation “unbelievable” and said he’d had to drive a cancerstricken passenger home from Heathrow after a delay of nearly four hours on the tarmac left the elderly man stranded.
The problems continued yesterday with delays at Gatwick and mass cancellations of short-haul flights from Heathrow. Some passengers were not offered free food or water on the planes, and most left London’s airports without luggage they had checked in, only to find hotels’ “surge” pricing put rooms at more than £1,000 per night.
Laura Thomson and Sam Sciortino were forced to postpone their Greek island wedding after their bridesmaids were grounded at Heathrow airport.
Marcia Thomson, Laura’s sister-in law and bridesmaid, said: “You couldn’t make it up. I am just a shell of myself right now. We are absolutely shattered.”
Experts believe BA will face compensation payouts in excess of £50million but stands to lose the same again in goodwill payments and lost custom.
Last night the company’s new chief executive was under fire, with questions asked as to his suitability for the role after a career in low-cost airlines.
Many of the airline’s IT systems had been recovered last night but BA warned passengers not to arrive at Heathrow today until 90 minutes prior to their scheduled departure time.
IT WAS a simple act of humanity on a weekend of utter misery for thousands of travellers who had the misfortune to have booked with British Airways.
When Stephen Wearing, a senior pilot, landed at Heathrow, he and his passengers – along with thousands of others – were told they would simply have to wait.
Inside the terminal, chaos reigned. The first indication that all was not well had come at around 11am, when customers trying to access the company’s website to check in or view arrival times were greeted by a single word, “error”.
Ominous though it was, it could not have prepared them for the extent of the misery they would have to endure.
At Heathrow and Gatwick, passengers had noticed that BA staff at checkin desks were taking down details by pen and paper, rather than typing them into the system.
Behind the scenes, and unknown to the thousands of passengers preparing to fly away for a bank holiday break, the airline’s IT systems had collapsed.
After an 11-hour flight from Rio, Capt Wearing was told to park until a gate became available.
During the wait of more than threeand-a-half hours, passengers read on their phones of the global IT disruption that had left all of BA’S London outbound flights cancelled and disrupted thousands of passengers’ holiday plans.
Capt Wearing eventually got his passengers on to buses destined for Terminal 5, but one elderly man returning to Britain for a cancer operation was too frail to walk.
He said: “Victor was ill with cancer. He’d had two strokes and we’d had to move him to Club (class) to lie down.
“It was an unbelievable situation. It was the worst I’ve experienced. That’s why we thought it was maybe malicious: everything was down.”
After asking the man about his onward travel plans, Capt Wearing phoned the friend due to pick up his passenger, only to learn that he was now unavailable, having understood the flight to have been cancelled. So he took matters into his own hands.
“There was a two-hour wait for the people who transport wheelchair passengers, so I got my two bags and Victor, and I pushed him through.”
Capt Wearing, 61, then drove the pensioner, whom he described as “incredibly grateful”, home to Chelsea himself.
Inside the terminal buildings, the queues were growing. The Daily Tel- egraph understands that, even as the catastrophic extent of systems failure became known, British Airways refused offers of help from its IT supplier, Amadeus Global, which hosts the passenger booking, transaction and flight information.
The airline has not denied this, although it has hit back strongly against suggestions that the failure was due to a cyber attack, after the Royal United Services Institute questioned how a “power outage” could really cause such a systemic failure.
Ewan Lawson, an expert at the think tank, said: “I would not write off the possibility that there’s been an attack on the software, either from the outside or by a disgruntled employee.”
The software used by the Germanybased company, Altea, is shared by other airlines, yet only BA was unable to access the vital data.
By 4.30pm, BA conceded it would have to cancel the rest of the day’s flights. A scramble for nearby accommodation ensued, and many exasperated passengers were unable to find rooms cheaper than £1,000 a night.
Those who stayed in the airports were left to sleep on yoga mats, as conference rooms were opened to provide makeshift dormitories.
As yesterday morning broke, Heathrow Terminal 5 was again descending into chaos.
Travellers were told not to arrive at the airport more than 90 minutes before their flight in an attempt to keep down queues.
However, even those who turned up at 5am reported still having no flight information by midday.
Many of those who did manage to fly out of the UK yesterday arrived without their luggage. Terry Page, 28, from London, flew from Terminal 5 to Fort Worth, Texas. “It’s been a terrible, terrible day,” he said.
“It’s affected so many people. Some 80-year-old lady was standing around waiting for announcements … and she fell over.”
Alex Cruz, the company’s chief executive, has apologised for the “huge inconvenience” caused by the failure.
But yesterday the former budget airlines boss was accused of triggering the crisis by outsourcing hundreds of IT jobs to India. Since being appointed
in April last year, Mr Cruz has overseen a cost-cutting drive that removed free food from short-haul flights and has seen customer satisfaction plunge.
A Which? report in December found that customer satisfaction with BA had fallen to 67 per cent for short-haul and 60 per cent for long-haul flights, putting it 10th in a table of 23 British carriers.
A spokesman for the airline said: “We are extremely sorry for the disruption caused to customers, and understand how much frustration this is causing.”