Flights started to return to normal on Thursday after an air traffic control failure caused thousands of flight cancellations and affected more than 330,000 people.
Thousands of passengers have been stranded for days, both at home and abroad, as they await flights back home. Weary holidaymakers at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted slept with their luggage on the floor as others jostled for spare seats and spent hours waiting for airline staff to pick up the phone.
The airport repercussions of the technical fault may continue for some days as airlines deal with knock-on impacts. Passengers have also been warned that they are unlikely to be eligible for any compensation.
“Although passengers should be looked after by airlines, they are unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident,” the British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said on Wednesday.
The CAA “reminded airlines of their responsibilities to look after passengers” but said the outage is likely to be considered the result of “extraordinary circumstances” under passenger rights rules, making compensation claims difficult.
As of 12am Thursday, aviation analytics company Cirium said 417 UK flights were cancelled or did not fly on Wednesday, with an total of 2,163 flights affected since Tuesday. It noted that cancellations had slowed with just five flights cancelled for Thursday as of midnight.
Passengers wait inside and around London Heathrow Airport on Wednesday (Photo: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu/Getty)Operations ‘return to normal’
Many planes were out of place due to the fault but aviation minister Keir Mather said on Thursday morning the disruption had “largely passed”.
A London Stansted spokeswoman said flights are due to arrive and depart as scheduled on Thursday. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Manchester Airport advised passengers on Thursday morning to prepare to travel as normal.
Gatwick said that operations at its airport had “returned to normal” following Tuesday’s air traffic control incident, and Heathrow said it continues to work closely with airlines to ensure the majority of flights operate as normal, although there may still be some changes to schedules.
Some 330,000 passengers have so far been impacted since the fault began, according to industry body Airlines UK. The group said more than 155,000 passengers had had flights cancelled, while flights had been delayed for more than 180,000 passengers.
British Airways said it was forced to cancel almost 550 of its flights, which had impacted more than 85,000 passengers. The airline said it was “incredibly sorry” to its customers and that the issue had been “entirely out of our control”.
It said it expects to “operate a normal schedule” on Thursday.
‘I feel let down’
Nathalie Stocks, 26, told The i Paper that her flight to Portugal was cancelled twice.
Following successive flight cancellations, Stocks said she and fellow passengers “were taken down to get our bags at about 7pm and actually got them at about 10pm because the luggage from 40 cancelled flights was all going down one baggage reclaim.
“There was one member of staff for thousands and thousands of people. People were getting crushed. It was awful.”
Nathalie Stocks was caught up in the airport chaos after her flight to Portugal was cancelled twiceA tearful bride-to-be en route to her wedding in Italy was also among the thousands of passengers stranded following the fault, along with her father, who had travelled from his home in Thailand to be there for the ceremony in Ischia.
Kevin Turner said he and his daughter arrived at Heathrow early on Wednesday morning to be told their Naples-bound flight had been cancelled.
The 77-year-old said: “I’ve come all the way from Thailand just for this wedding and I can’t walk properly because I had a bad operation a couple of years ago – so this will probably be the last time I’ll be able to make this trip, it’s like a golden opportunity and I feel a little bit let down.”
They now hope to travel to Gatwick, fly to Milan, catch another flight to Naples early on Thursday and then a boat to Ischia. The wedding is on Sunday, but events start on Friday with a welcome to their friends, who have already arrived.
Kevin Turner says his Naples-bound flight had been cancelled and was having to rearrange travel (Photo: Sarah Collier/PA)Air traffic chief faces calls to resign
The National Air Traffic Services (Nats) has apologised for disruption to passengers and airlines, for which its chief executive Martin Rolfe said he took “full responsibility”.
Wizz Air and Ryanair have called on Rolfe to resign.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary repeated calls for Rolfe to go on Thursday, and accused the Government, which owns a 49 per cent stake in Nats, of trying to protect him.
“We think he should be sacked and somebody competent brought in to do the job,” O’Leary said.
British Airways said it has “long made the case for improved resilience in aviation” and issues raised by the system failure need “to be addressed as a matter of urgency”.
“We’ve heard reassurances before, but then we’re faced with issues like this yet again. Our customers and colleagues are tired of dealing with these issues, time after time. This needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency,” an airline spokesperson said.
Cyber attack ruled out – but failure ‘not unavoidable’
On Wednesday, Downing Street said the Government still had confidence in Rolfe.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told MPs earlier that she did not believe the air traffic control problems were “unavoidable” and apologised for the disruption.
“We often take for granted the way in which our aviation system just works, but yesterday that was not the case,” Alexander told the House of Commons on Wednesday.
Aviation analytics company Cirium said as of 7.30pm, 357 flights had been cancelled or not taken off at UK airports on Wednesday (Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty)“Safety must remain air traffic controllers’ overriding priority, and this morning I have spoken to Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe, who informed me this outage was due to a technical issue at their Swanwick site.
She said it was her understanding that a cyber attack was not the cause of the fault, but a further investigation and independent review would be needed, carried out by the CAA, which will report to her within six months. Nats has also said a full investigation will be conducted into the issue.
Speaking in the Commons on Thursday, Mather defended the six-month investigation timeframe as “proportionate” and “timely”.
“It will allow us to react quickly with stringent ministerial oversight,” he told MPs.
Asked about the cost of the incident to the UK economy, Mather said he was not in the position currently to give a “pounds and pence figure” of the economic impact, but added: “I am under no illusion that it is incredibly significant”.
‘Safety prioritised over disruption’
Dr Guy Gratton of Cranfield University told The i Paper that despite the chaos, Nats had rightly prioritised “safety over disruption”. He said the association was receiving “a lot of flak” from stranded passengers and airlines, but the safety mechanisms in place were “working as intended”.
Gratton said the specific air traffic control outage – limited to the UK – could be bypassed by allowing aeroplanes to launch on their own, without Nats oversight, and let on-route controllers detect the planes once in their airspace.
“I’m sure somebody has gone off and had a think about that, and they have clearly decided this is not an acceptable risk,” Gratton said. “We should be quite thankful of that – although they are getting a lot of flak, the organisations involved, especially Nats, have clearly prioritised safety over disruption. That should absolutely be the right call.
“Whilst a lot of people are fairly peeved, and there’s clearly a few airline chief executives who are particularly peeved, the system is working as intended. When things are disrupted, they are making sure everybody is safe first and then worrying about all the other issues – exactly how it should be.”
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