Thousands of holidaymakers were left stranded in airport chaos partly because of a remote-working engineer’s password failure, an investigation has found.
The computer shutdown at NATS, the UK’s air traffic control, in August 2023, resulted in an estimated 700,000 passengers facing cancellations and delays.
According to the Civil Aviation Authority report, the engineer, who was working from home, was unable to reset the system remotely and took around three hours to arrive at the site to resolve the issue. The report stated: “Several factors made the identification and rectification of the failure more protracted than it might otherwise have been.”
It continued: “The Level 2 engineer was rostered on-call and therefore was not available on site at the time of the failure.”
(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
“Having exhausted remote intervention options, it took 1.5hours for the individual to arrive on-site to perform the necessary full system re-start which was not possible remotely.”
The resulting delays, which lasted for days, grounded planes and prevented landings, costing airlines approximately £100million in compensation payouts, reports the Mirror.
The inquiry found that IT support engineers were permitted to work from home on one of the busiest days for air travel, and the assigned engineer was unable to log in remotely due to the system crash and password rejection. A flight from Los Angeles to Paris experienced a failure on August 28.
(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
The issue was detected at 8:30am at NATS headquarters in Swanwick, Hampshire, and an engineer was alerted half an hour later. NATS has pledged to review its resilience plans to avoid a similar incident in the future.
The report makes clear once again that airlines and passengers were severely let down by NATS due to its failure of resilience and lack of planning,” said EasyJet chief executive John Lundren, as reported by the BBC. “Airlines were then left picking up the pieces and costs, which ran into millions.”
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