Air traffic control meltdown enters third day as UK collapse branded an ‘international embarrassment’
The first repatriation flights bringing people stranded by Monday’s air traffic control failure back to Gatwick are due to take off, as the catastrophic outage is branded an ‘international embarrassment’.
Passengers on easyJet who had been left behind in Palma, Majorca, and Faro in Portugal will be the first to get a flight home today, with trips back from other destinations coming later in the week.
It is just the latest attempt to mop up some of the mess caused by the worst failure of the British air traffic control system in at least a decade, which led to bank holiday misery for tens of thousands.
More than 1,500 flights to and from the UK were cancelled on Monday and Tuesday, leaving holidaymakers sleeping on airport floors and chairs – with some running low on medication or missing important life events.
National Air Traffic Services (Nats) said it had received flight data that caused both its primary and its backup systems to suspend automatic processing on Monday morning.
The issue meant all flight plans had to be processed manually, resulting in significant disruption for every flight heading in or out of the UK.
While the problem was solved on Monday afternoon, the chaos continues.
As of 9am today, 64 more flights had been cancelled, with Heathrow the worst-affected airport followed by Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
Travel consultant Paul Charles told The Telegraph: ‘One flight plan corrupted the whole system.
‘It is an international embarrassment that our whole air traffic system collapsed because of it.’
The former head of British Airways said the Nats explanation for the incident was ‘staggering’.
Willie Walsh told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘This system should be designed to reject data that’s incorrect, not to collapse the system.
‘If that is true, it demonstrates a considerable weakness that must have been there for some time and I’m amazed if that is the cause of this.
‘Clearly we’ll wait for the full evaluation of the problem but that explanation doesn’t stand up from what I know of the system.’
He said he thought it was ‘very unfair’ that airlines could be facing a cost impact of up to £100 million while the air traffic control system ‘doesn’t pay a single penny’.
Speaking on the Today programme, Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe said the faulty flight data could not be rejected ‘like a piece of spam’.
He explained: ‘Our systems are safety-critical systems, they are dealing with the lives of passengers and the travelling public, so even things like just throwing data away needs to be very carefully considered.
‘If you throw away a critical piece of data you may end up in the next 30 seconds, a minute or an hour with something that then is not right on the screens in front of the controller. So it is nothing like throwing away spam.’
There is speculation that a French airline may have caused the issue by submitting a flight plan to Nats in the wrong format.
Downing Street did not rule out the possibility, and Nats has said the conclusions of a report it is preparing with the Civil Aviation Authority for Transport Secretary Mark Harper will be made public.
In a statement, easyJet said: ‘During this traditionally very busy week for travel, options for returning to the UK are more limited on some routes and so easyJet will be operating five repatriation flights to London Gatwick over the coming days from Palma and Faro on August 30, and Tenerife and Enfidha on August 31 and from Rhodes on September 1.
‘We are also operating larger aircraft on key routes including Faro, Ibiza, Dalaman and Tenerife to provide some additional 700 seats this week.’
MORE : Dawn O’Porter ‘lives in Mallorca now’ after flight cancellation and delay chaos
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.