WFH worker who made Britain's air traffic control meltdown worse: More than 700k passengers were delayed when engineer was allowed to work remotely and his password didn't work

Skip to comments.

Posted on 11/14/2024 7:39:46 AM PST by DFG

A bank holiday air traffic control meltdown that left more than 700,000 passengers stranded was made worse because a work-from-home engineer's password wouldn't work.

Chaos erupted at airports across the UK last August when a flight-plan glitch caused the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) computer system to collapse.

With the system down, flights could not take off or land at any airport, causing hellish delays that lasted for days and cost airlines £100 million in compensation.

A Civil Aviation Authority inquiry into the incident today found that IT support engineers were allowed to work from home on one of the busiest days of the year.

The engineer assigned to fix the problem struggled to login remotely because the system had crashed, so it would not accept his password.

It took an hour and a half for them to get into their office, where they performed a 'full system re-start' — which did not resolve the problem.

While thousands of holidaymakers were stuck at airports or on the tarmac, advice was sought from an off-site senior engineer, who also did not understand why the system had failed so dramatically.

Finally, four hours after the initial incident, someone phoned the system's German manufacturer, Frequentis Comsoft, and the issue was identified.

By the time it was resolved, the backlog was so huge that many passengers did not fly until days later, so holidays were cut short or cancelled completely.

Today, the Civil Aviation Authority called for senior engineers to be on duty in the NATS offices all times to avoid a repeat of the disaster.

It also called for toothless airline regulators to be given more power to ensure customers are quickly and properly compensated — as some travellers waited 'many weeks, and in some cases months' for out-of-pocket expenses to be refunded.

(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...

1 posted on 11/14/2024 7:39:46 AM PST by DFG

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson