Computer engineers working from home were behind the air traffic meltdown that led to thousands of holidays being cancelled, the boss of Ryanair has claimed.
Michael O’Leary made the explosive allegations during a furious attack on National Air Traffic Services (NATS), claiming that engineers were ‘watching morning TV’ at home instead of doing their job.
More than 300,000 travellers around the world had their flights cancelled or delayed in August, leaving them without accommodation, food, or a way home.
Mr O’Leary told MPs investigating the systems failure on Bank Holiday Monday, August 28, that it led to 2,000 flight cancellations and delays for another 4,000.
He said the situation was made worse because some computer system engineers who were required to step in during a crisis were working from home.
He told the transport select committee: “When they went looking for their engineers, they were working remotely in order to save travel time.
“Engineers were sitting at home watching morning TV instead of being where they are supposed to be.”
Bosses at NATS confirmed they did turn to engineers working remotely, however, they insisted there was ‘no truth’ in the claim that this made the situation worse.
It has been estimated that airlines face a $192 million bill for helping stranded customers.
This will be passed on to travellers through higher fares.
Mr O’Leary said NATS should be responsible for covering Ryanair’s bill of $28 million.
He described the management at the organisation as ‘numpties’, saying they were at fault for the ‘collapse’ of the system and had failed to give airlines proper warning.
He condemned NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe, who has a $2.5 million pay package, saying he should be stripped of bonuses and sacked.
He told the committee: “We wrote to Martin Rolfe, the vastly overpaid and incompetent chief executive of UK NATS, asking for reimbursement of our £ 15 million in right-to-care expenses, and we get a reply saying “it’s not in our remit”. You don’t need a remit to do the right thing.”
Mr O’Leary added: “I don’t believe he should continue as chief executive of NATS; he should resign or be dismissed. Then we might get someone in there competent to run the system to avoid a repeat of these shambles.”
The system failure was caused by a software glitch linked to the flight plan of a single long-haul flight passing through UK airspace.
The system and its backup effectively shut down because it could not cope with the fact that two so-called way points along the flight’s route had duplicate identification references.
Mr Rolfe said that on the day, it was tackled by on-site computer engineers, a second group of on-call engineers, who were working remotely, plus experts at the company which built the software in Austria.
He rejected the criticism from Ryanair, saying: “We are a very serious organisation with safety at the heart of the culture.
“We have the right number of air traffic controllers, the right number of engineers on site. In addition, we do have the ability – as you would expect any modern company – to be able to have people dial in remotely to help assist when things fail.
“I would probably argue that because we were able to access people more quickly, including those people overseas… we were able to get them working on the problem within hours.”
He said ‘there was no truth’ in Mr O’Leary’s claims that a shortage of computer engineers in its offices exacerbated the crisis.
On the issue of reimbursing airlines, Mr Rolfe said: “I absolutely understand the frustration of the airlines in the context of the expenses they have to incur.”
He added that the issue “goes back to effectively the way NATS is constructed”.
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