Receive free UK airports updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest UK airports news every morning.
Hundreds of thousands of airline passengers faced potentially long delays and flight cancellations at the end of the busy summer bank holiday weekend following a failure of the UK‘s air traffic control system.
National Air Traffic Services (Nats) said on Monday afternoon that it had identified and remedied a “technical issue” that lasted more than five hours and forced it to severely restrict the number of aircraft allowed to land and take-off across the country.
But the knock-on effects will lead to continued disruption to services as airlines and airports scramble to reorganise flights.
London Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, said the disruption had affected services across the country. It said schedules would “remain significantly disrupted for the rest of the day” even though the problem had been fixed, and passengers should check their flight was still operating before leaving for the airport.
British Airways said that its schedule had been “severely disrupted” and warned it would have to make “significant changes” to its schedule. It said passengers on short haul services should check the status of their flights.
The disruption comes on one of the busier days of the year, as holidaymakers return to the UK on the final day of the bank holiday weekend. Downing Street said transport secretary Mark Harper was working closely with Nats to address the problem.
John Strickland, an aviation analyst, said that the outage would cause widespread disruption. “There will be hundreds of thousands of passengers affected by the problem,” he said.
“It’s an enormous problem given the complexity on what should be a gold mine period for UK airlines,” he added, warning of the financial impact on airlines of having to rebook passengers and reorganise their schedule.
Ryanair warned the problems were affecting “all airlines operating to and from the UK today” and said it would be forced to delay or cancel “a number of flights” as a result.
Nats said that it would continue to work closely with airlines and airports to manage the flights affected as efficiently as possible. “Our engineers will be carefully monitoring the system’s performance as we return to normal operations,” it added.
While the system failure affected all flights into and out of British airports Nats said UK airspace had remained open throughout.
Data provider Cirium said 232 flights have been cancelled departing UK airports as of Monday afternoon, equivalent to around 8 per cent of all departures. It said that it had identified 271 arriving flights that had also been cancelled. But it warned there were many more aircraft that had been delayed.
“Today’s chaos will be a source of extreme anxiety for hundreds of thousands of travellers trying to return home or fly out of the UK after the bank holiday weekend,” said Lisa Webb, of Which, the consumer group.
Eurocontrol, the organisation that oversees air traffic management for Europe, said the failure related to the UK’s “flight data processing system”, which is critical in helping air traffic controllers and airlines share real-time information on flight plans.
Airlines flying into the UK have warned passengers to expect severe disruption, with some flights scheduled for Monday afternoon now being pushed into Tuesday morning.
