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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’ — …