Desk-shy airport staff working from home were behind flight meltdown which saw 300,000 summer holidays cancelled
AN air traffic control meltdown that disrupted hundreds of thousands of flights last year was made worse by engineers "sitting at home in their pyjamas" working remotely.
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, 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.
Downing Street said the scale of disruption was a "completely unacceptable situation" and that the interim report was "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.
This is because on public holidays – when maintenance is not routinely scheduled - it was "common practice for staff to be available on standby at remote locations – typically at home”.
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But this meant 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 also not sought “for more than three hours after the initial failure”, according to the report.
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary slammed the National Air Traffic Services engineers for "sitting at home in their pyjamas" on one of the "busiest travel weekends of the year for air travel".
He added: “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."
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His comments were echoed by lobby group AirlinesUK, with its chief executive Tim Alderslade saying: "This report contains damning evidence that Nats’ basic resilience planning and procedures were wholly inadequate and fell well below the standard that should be expected for national infrastructure of this importance."
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.”
The report warned improvements to resilience planning are needed to avoid another meltdown in the future.
It highlighted a “significant lack of pre-planning” at Nats, without “any multi-agency rehearsal of the management of an incident of this nature and scale”.
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 abroad for several days because of the number of flight cancellations and delays.
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The combined cost to airlines in providing refunds, rebookings, hotel rooms and refreshments to affected passengers was estimated at around £100 million by industry body the International Air Transport Association (Iata).