Willie Walsh, the head of British Airways owner IAG, has backed the BA boss in his first interview since the IT fiasco that grounded flights last weekend.
He said Alex Cruz, the British Airways chief executive, had done a great job.
Mr Walsh said he doubted anyone could have managed the challenge better and that Mr Cruz did well to get planes back in the air as quickly as he did.
The IAG boss again apologised for the chaos caused by the outage.
“Clearly we will do everything we can to make up [for] the disruption they suffered,” Mr Walsh said.
Saturday’s IT meltdown grounded hundreds of flights and disrupted the travel plans of tens of thousands of passengers around the world.
Mr Walsh said it was unfair to try to blame Mr Cruz because the problem was not of his making.
“We know what happened but we’re still investigating why it happened and that investigation will take some time,” he said.
“The team at British Airways did everything they could in the circumstances to recover the operation as quickly as they did and our focus will be on making sure that any of our customers who experienced disruption are managed and satisfied with how we handled things.”
The airline said on Wednesday that a loss of power to a UK data centre was “compounded” by a power surge that took out its IT systems.
BA claimed that this did not constitute an IT failure, but rather “it was an electrical power supply which was interrupted”.
