London (AFP) – UK air travellers faced more misery Wednesday with nearly 300 flights scrapped across the country, as Britain’s air traffic control service scrambled to recover from a technical glitch which it ruled out as a cyberattack. After 1,746 flights were cancelled on the first day of the outage on Tuesday, another 291 were axed on Wednesday — the majority to and from London Heathrow, the UK’s biggest and one of Europe’s busiest airports — according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
“We ended up sitting on our plane for just over five hours,” Matt Ernster, 28, who was returning to Boston via Heathrow from his honeymoon in Paris on Tuesday, told AFP. When they were finally allowed to disembark from the plane, “it turned into a gigantic, chaotic scene,” Ernster said. The baggage collection “felt like an apocalyptic situation,” and there were no hotels available in a two-hour radius. “It was the worst travel experience I’ve ever had.”
The head of the National Air Traffic Services (NATS), Martin Rolfe, said “we have at this point ruled out cyber” activity as a cause. “We don’t believe it was a cyberattack,” he told BBC Radio. Rolfe said NATS will be doing a “very, very thorough” investigation into what exactly caused the incident. National carrier British Airways said it had to cancel more than 190 flights during the incident, which it said affected “tens of thousands of our customers.”
The air traffic chaos followed a technical glitch in July last year that saw scores of flights to and from the UK cancelled, prompting anger from airline chiefs. Britain suffered its worst air systems failure in years in 2023, with more than 700,000 passengers affected after hundreds of flights were delayed or cancelled.
UK news outlets reported that British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander had summoned Rolfe to a meeting with her. Alexander said on X that she was “seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job.” Rolfe told Sky News he accepted “full responsibility” but declined to say if he was considering quitting his job. Neal McMahon, chief operations officer at Irish no-frills airline Ryanair, called for Rolfe to be fired, accusing him of having “failed UK travellers.”
Heathrow said late Tuesday that departures had resumed after the “technical issue” forced the airport to suspend arrivals, while warning that “disruption is expected to continue.”
Caught up by the glitch, healthcare worker Josie Donoghue endured “an absolute nightmare” at London’s Gatwick airport, having had to disembark her flight to Ireland after three hours stuck on the runway. “Getting through that airport was like trying to get out of Alcatraz,” she told Britain’s domestic Press Association.
Susie Senahe, 55, who was travelling back to Accra in Ghana after visiting her daughter in the UK, had been rebooked onto a Friday flight. She told AFP on Wednesday she was planning to sleep at the Heathrow terminal until then. Another woman travelling to the US, who did not want to be named, said she slept in the airport Tuesday night because nearby hotels were “fully booked.”
Manchester, Birmingham, and Edinburgh airports were also affected, while Dublin airport said it had cancelled dozens of flights. Ryanair said more than 65,000 of its passengers had been disrupted with 50 of its flights cancelled. English football club Arsenal, due to play Napoli in the Champions League Wednesday in the southern Italian city, was forced to cancel a news conference after the team’s flight was delayed.
© 2024 AFP
