British Airways: Airline's global IT crash could cause disruption for 'several days', experts warn

The British Airways IT crash that has caused chaos for holidaymakers could cause disruption for several days, experts say.

Passengers trying to fly from Heathrow and Gatwick for the Bank Holiday weekend were left stranded after the airline cancelled all of its flights.

The company cancelled all flights from the London airports for the whole of Saturday, and it is feared it could take days for services to return to normal and clear the passenger backlog.

Air industry consultant John Strickland said: "There's a massive knock-on effect.

"Customers and from the airline's point of view - manpower, dealing with the backlog of aircraft out of position, parking spaces for the aircraft - it's a challenge and a choreographic nightmare."

He added that problems with BA's IT systems last year were not on the scale of this issue.

"They were bedding in a new check-in system last year and there were teething problem but not of the magnitude of this," Mr Strickland said.

The disruption has been compounded by the timing of the outage coinciding with a bank holiday weekend and school half-term holidays.

"Heathrow ordinarily would be busy but would be exacerbated by the bank holiday, half-term and Ascension Day, which is celebrated in a lot of Europe," Mr Strickland added.

"Even if they could quickly get the show back on the road, which is a big uncertainty, disruption could run into several days."

Malcolm Ginsberg, editor in chief at Business Travel News, said: "This is a very, very serious situation, one that will not be solved overnight, even once they get the technology aspects of it done - it's going to be three or four days.

"There's only full aircraft at this time of year and there will be aircraft in the wrong positions.

"Of course I feel sorry for the passengers but for the staff as well who have got to deal with it all."

Alex Cruz, BA’s CEO, apologised to customers planning to travel from the London airports on Saturday.

He said a "power supply issue" was probably behind a global IT failure that grounded scores of flights.

Passengers were told not to travel to the airports because of "extreme congestion" after all BA flights from Heathrow and Gatwick were cancelled.