Willie Walsh, the chief executive of British Airways parent company IAG, has praised BA bosses for “doing everything possible” after the IT meltdown that left 75,000 passengers stranded over the bank holiday weekend.
Walsh’s comments came as British Airways’ board is reportedly demanding an external inquiry into the fiasco that caused almost all the airline’s flights out of London to be cancelled on Saturday and is expected to land BA with a compensation bill of more than £100m.
Walsh told the BBC and reporters in Spain on Thursday that the investigation into the unexplained “power surge” said to have caused the chaos would take time. But he insisted that BA’s management, led by Spanish chief executive Alex Cruz, “did everything they could in the circumstances”.
The airline has been criticised for not promising full compensation to all those affected, but Walsh pledged: “Our focus will be on making sure that any of our customers who experienced disruption are satisfied with how we handled things. Clearly we will do everything we can to make up for the disruption that they suffered.”
However, customers have been further angered by BA’s online claim forms, which instructs them to first seek compensation via their travel insurance – leaving many liable to pay an excess. The Association of British Insurers has complained to the airline that it is giving misleading information and that BA should be the first point of call.
What level of compensation the airline intends to provide will be of intense interest to customers still waiting for their bags to be returned – even though they were unable to fly.
Paul Sutherland, 44, a gym owner and Ultimate Fighting Championship official from Gloucester, spent 12 hours stuck at Heathrow instead of flying to Sweden, missing a bout where he was due to be a judge. He said that after five days he had received no response to numerous calls to BA, but was texted by the airline on Thursday afternoon to say his bags – containing his work laptop and business documents – could be collected from Stockholm tomorrow.
Sutherland said: “I’ve got travel insurance but it doesn’t cover me for this. Who’s going to cover the compensation for the loss of earnings? I’ve lost thousands this week. And I’ve still had no response from BA.”
British Airways refused to confirm BBC reports that the board would be looking for external experts to lead an inquiry. A spokeswoman said: “As we have already said, there will be an in-depth investigation into what happened.”
The airline is still struggling to get to the root of the problem. Walsh said that they knew what caused the systems crash, but they did not know why it had happened. He explained: “It was not an IT failure. It was a failure of electrical power to our IT systems. We understand what happened. We’re investigating why it happened. ”
BA’s explanations have been met with scepticism and more questions over how such a power outage could affect the IT systems, with unions pointing to costcutting and outsourcing at the airline.
Experts said that companies would usually expect to have a functioning uninterruptible power supply – the equivalent of a big battery to take over if mains power fails – and better disaster recovery. In its latest explanation, the airline said: “There was a loss of power to the UK data centre which was compounded by the uncontrolled return of power which caused a power surge taking out our IT systems. So we know what happened, we just need to find out why.
National Grid and power suppliers in the area including SSE have stated that there was no power surge, suggesting there was an internal problem at its data centre, Boadicea House, near Heathrow.
BA’s creaking IT infrastructure includes over 500 data cabinets across six halls around its Waterside base, northwest of Heathrow. A contractor with knowledge of Boadicea House said: “It’s a very old facility, there are lots and lots of problems with it. We weren’t particularly surprised, knowing the set-up there.” He added that a number of senior managers at the data centre have retired or left in the past three years.
The GMB union has pointed to more than 200 redundancies made in the IT department under ferocious costcutting plans, which included bringing in staff from India on work visas.
The airline group’s head of IT, Bill Francis, told investors in 2015 that he would find savings of about €90m (£78m) per year from outsourcing IT operations, which followed cuts in pay and conditions for BA’s cabin crew.
Francis has emailed staff with more detail on the investigation to date, which has found that an uninterruptible power supply to a core data centre at Heathrow was over-ridden. He said: “This resulted in the total immediate loss of power to the facility, bypassing the backup generators and batteries … After a few minutes of this shutdown of power, it was turned back on in an unplanned and uncontrolled fashion, which created physical damage to the system, and significantly exacerbated the problem.”
The carrier restarted long-haul flights on Sunday but was unable to resume a full schedule until Tuesday.
