![]() It is going to be different variances of bad – there are no good outcomes here.” Passengers are going to have to grin and bear it. Any other weekend would have been manageable. “You have aircraft out of position and crews out of hours. The knock-on effect could be longer than that for some airlines and destinations, but the majority should be back in a couple of days. That means this relatively short outage will impact for five days.”Ī senior airline executive said: “It is going to be at least a couple of days of disruption. Then you have the higher volume of people travelling at the moment, with numbers back to approaching pre-pandemic levels. “It always takes three days to recover anyway. The reason for that is that you have so many planes and crews that are out of position. Paul Charles, the chief executive of The PC Agency, a travel consultancy, said “This six-hour outage will impact flights for five days. Luton, Manchester, Newcastle and London Stansted airports all said the disruption was likely to continue, with planes at the wrong airports because of the disruption. It advised passengers on short haul flights that anyone due to travel on Tuesday could move their flights to a later date free of charge. On Monday afternoon, British Airways told passengers that no flights would take off until 6pm and that all check-in desks were closed. And have just been told UK airspace is shut.”Īround half the British team were also said to be stranded in Budapest, and were forced to find hotels to stay for the night. ![]() She tweeted: “After almost three weeks away from home I am hours from hugging my family. Gabby Logan, the BBC broadcaster, who was returning from the World Athletic Championships in Budapest, was among those caught up in the chaos. “It is my suspicion that the impact of these limitations will become more significant in the coming days as airlines try to align these limitations with their recovering schedules.” Joel Stansfield, the general secretary of the Independent Pilots Association, which represents commercial pilots, warned passengers that delays were likely for “days to come”, adding: “Pilots have strict, legally binding limitations to their working hours – this is to ensure safe working practices and to lessen fatigue. Senior figures in the airline industry said it would take time for services to return to normal because planes would need to be moved and pilots would need to rest. Security sources said the fault appeared to be a genuine technical problem and was not believed to be the work of cyber-hackers or a hostile foreign state. She added: “It will take some time for flights to return to normal, and we will continue to work with the airlines and the airports to recover the situation.” On Monday night Juliet Kennedy, the Nats operations director, said the system failure would be “very thoroughly investigated”, adding that incoming and outgoing flights had to be reduced to “manage safety”. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, urged passengers affected to contact their airlines and said: “I am very cognisant that this will disrupt people’s travel plans – those who are waiting to arrive in the UK, those waiting to depart – and I do sympathise with any disruption they may be experiencing.” Nats announced that it had “identified and remedied” the issue shortly after 3pm, but Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, warned that “flights are still unfortunately affected”. Others were left aboard grounded aircraft for hours, while some arrived at airports to find their flights had been cancelled or delayed by up to 12 hours.Īround one million people were expected to travel through UK airports on the August bank holiday, with 3,049 flights due to depart and another 3,054 scheduled to arrive.īut just after midday Nats announced a nationwide “failure of the flight planning system”, meaning controllers had to enter the information manually, significantly reducing the number of flights permitted to take off and land.īy early afternoon, around 500 flights had been cancelled, while data showed that 78 per cent of flights at Heathrow and 74 per cent of those at Gatwick had been delayed. More than 500 flights were cancelled by early afternoon and hundreds more delayed, leaving passengers stuck abroad with no flights back to the UK for up to a week. Thousands of passengers were stranded at departure gates after a fault at National Air Traffic Services (Nats) forced controllers to manually process flight plans on Monday morning. Holidaymakers have been warned to expect flight chaos until the end of the week following “a network-wide failure” of the UK’s air traffic control system on one of the busiest days of the year.
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