AN air traffic control meltdown that disrupted hundreds of thousands of flights during the August Bank Holiday was made worse by engineers “sitting in their pyjamas” working from home.
Shoddy planning was also to blame for the travel mayhem, according to a review commissioned by the aviation watchdog.
The outage affected nearly 750,000 passengers last year, including 300,000 people hit by cancellations, 95,000 by long delays of more than three hours, and a further 300,000 by shorter delays.
The delays also cost airlines tens of millions of pounds, with Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary slamming the National Air Traffic Services engineers for “sitting at home in their pyjamas” on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year.
Downing Street said the scale of disruption was a “completely unacceptable situation” and that the findings of the report were “concerning”.
The inquiry by the Civil Aviation Authority found fixing the problem was “more protracted than it might otherwise have been” because senior engineers were not in the office over the Bank Holiday.
On public holidays – when maintenance is not routinely scheduled – the inquiry found it is “common practice for staff to be available on standby at remote locations – typically at home”.
It took one engineer 90 minutes to arrive on site to perform the restart which “was not permitted remotely”.
The assistance of a more senior engineer was not sought “for more than three hours after the initial failure”, the report added.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “It was a completely unacceptable situation for passengers to face the scale of disruption that they did.
“We are clear that air traffic services must learn the lessons and ensure that this never happens again, so we welcome this interim report.
“We will allow the Civil Aviation Authority to publish its final report and the Government will work with the industry and airlines to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
Asked if Rishi Sunak thought those “lessons” could involve curtailing home-working, the spokesman said: “I think it is right to wait for the final report and recommendations”.
Ryanair chief executive Mr O’Leary said: “The CAA report confirms unbelievably that Nats engineers were sitting at home in their pyjamas on the UK’s August bank holiday weekend, which is one of the busiest travel weekends of the year for air travel.
“In any properly managed ATC service, engineers would be onsite to cover system breakdowns instead of sitting at home unable to log into the system.
“Overpaid Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe’s position in untenable.
“He should be removed, and somebody competent employed to run UK ATC, to ensure its engineers are at work during busy weekends and to ensure that UK Nats has a management team delivering a functional ATC system with adequate pre-planning, documentation and coordination.”
Lobby group AirlinesUK also said the review “contains damning evidence that Nats’ basic resilience planning and procedures were wholly inadequate”.
The report said improvements to resilience planning are be needed to avoid another meltdown in future.
There does not seem to have been any rehearsal of how to manage such an incident, despite that being “best practice” and common in other sectors.
The report describes “a significant lack of pre-planning and coordination” between different parts of the industry for unusual “major events and incidents”.
Nats said in a statement it followed “engineering protocols” on August 28 and there were “engineers both on site and on call”.
It added: “The Level 2 on-call engineers are individual system experts and able to start working immediately when issues arise.
“They were not able to fix the issue remotely in this case.”
Some travellers were stranded overseas for several days because of the number of flight cancellations.
The combined cost to airlines in providing refunds, rebookings, hotel rooms and refreshments to affected passengers was previously estimated at around £100 million by industry body the International Air Transport Association (Iata).