AN airport meltdown that left thousands of travellers stranded was caused by an engineer working from home whose password failed, an inquiry has found.
Some 700,000 passengers were caught up in chaos during August bank holiday last year.
Mayhem erupted at airports up and down the country when a flight-plan glitch caused the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) computer system to collapse.
Flights were unable to take off and land – causing nightmare delays lasting days.
It also cost airlines £100million in compensation pay-outs.
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 then assigned to fix the problem struggled to login remotely because the system had crashed and would not accept his password.
Therefore, the problem worsened.
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