British Airways is now operating a full flight schedule after an IT failure saw the airline cancel thousands of flights over the bank holiday weekend.
“Our IT systems are now back up and running and we will be operating a full flight schedule at Heathrow and Gatwick,” the airline said.
But it warned it “may take some time” to reunite travelers with their bags.
BA chief executive Alex Cruz
Despite the knock on effect of the incident lasting three days, BA Chief Executive Alex Cruz said the hardware problem was restored “after a few hours”, and promised the company would “make sure that it doesn’t happen again”.
In his first interview since the systems failure, he said: “There was a power surge and there was a back-up system, which did not work at that particular point in time.”
He told the BBC this had affected “all the operating of our systems – baggage, operations, power processing”.
The GMB union has blamed the problem on technical staff being outsourced from the UK to India.
But Mr Cruz said there had been no redundancies or outsourcing in this area, adding that there had been “locally hired” staff attending to the maintenance and running of the infrastructure.
The focus is now likely to shift towards the financial impact on the airline.
BA is liable to reimburse thousands of passengers for refreshments and hotel expenses, and travel industry commentators have suggested the cost to the company – part of Europe’s largest airline group IAG – could run into tens of millions of pounds.
Shares in IAG, which is listed in both London and Madrid, were down more than 4% in early trade on the London Stock Exchange when it opened on Tuesday.
Davy analyst Stephen Furlong said the cost to the carrier of cancelling one day of operations was about £30m.
Questions remain about how a power problem could have had such impact.
The BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said one theory was that returning systems were unusable as the data had become unsynchronized.
