UK flight disruption will take ‘days’ to resolve after air traffic glitch

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Airline passengers faced flight delays and cancellations for a second day following a systems failure at the UK’s air traffic control services that grounded hundreds of flights.

British transport secretary Mark Harper warned on Tuesday morning that the disruption was “going to take some days” to resolve.

“I accept it’s disrupted thousands of people and it is going to take some days to get people back to where they should be,” Harper told the BBC.

Britain’s National Air Traffic Services on Monday was forced to restrict the capacity of UK airspace on the busy summer bank holiday weekend following a “technical issue” that had affected its ability to automatically process flight plans.

The cause of the failure would be investigated by the Civil Aviation Authority, Harper added, but he said the government was “clear it wasn’t a cyber attack”.

Airport executives said the majority of flights were expected to operate normally on Tuesday, but acknowledged there would be continued disruption as airline crew and aircraft reset their schedules after the previous day’s disruption.

Ryanair said that as a result of the air traffic control failure more than 20 of its aircraft were unable to get back to their home base and a “considerable number of our crews ran out of their legal duty hours limit”.

It added that passengers should expect flight disruptions as it worked to get aircraft and crews back on schedule. “We expect some flight cancellations and considerable flight delays today caused by this latest, still unexplained, Nats failure,” it said.

A Heathrow spokesperson said that “schedules continued to be affected by yesterday’s restrictions on UK airspace”. They added: “While the majority of passengers will still be able to travel, there will unfortunately be some disruption on some routes, including flight cancellations.”

Airlines were on Tuesday racing to restore flights and bring back stranded passengers. They are not expected to need to pay compensation — such system failures are deemed “extraordinary circumstances” — but will need to offer refunds or an alternative flight to passengers.

British Airways is advising passengers to check on their flights if on a short-haul service, and is offering to move flights to a later date free of charge.

As a result of the system failure, flight plans had to be inputted manually on Monday, which meant that Nat’s teams could not process them at the same volume.

While the operator had fixed the problem by Monday afternoon, the disruption caused a backlog of flights. Data on Flightradar24, the aviation website, showed that 36 flights were delayed and 31 cancelled at Heathrow airport, with 68 delayed at Gatwick and 23 cancelled.