Airline passengers entering and departing the UK face disruption for the remainder of the week after 33% of flights were cancelled on Monday, August 28 due to a five-hour technical outage in Air Traffic Control on what The Times named “the busiest day of the year”.
All UK airports are affected, but Heathrow is the worst-hit, being the busiest by far.
Travellers are still stranded in Britain and many Britons on their summer holidays are likewise stranded abroad, and there was a scramble to book new flights yesterday, Tuesday August 29, as it became apparent that the fallout from Monday’s outage would ripple onward through the week.
Complaints from passengers stranded in airport departure lounges have centred around being unable to find help from airport staff or airlines, facing closed airline call centres and airline apps that reportedly keep crashing.
Meanwhile, carriers plying routes between European summer hotspots and the UK on Monday, were obliged to make sweeping cancellations in an attempt to patch together their schedules, upended by the outage.
There were reports of fisticuffs at the airport in Palma, Mallorca and a scramble on the island for available beds for the night on Monday, after some flights initially just delayed were later marked “cancelled”. A violent storm passing through the island on Monday night did nothing to improve the mood.
Heathrow has said its services will remain significantly disrupted and airport management urged passengers to contact their airline before travelling to the airport.
The Times reported that 785 inbound flights were cancelled arriving into UK airports on August 28 and a further 790 departing flights were scrapped.
Among those affected were the British athletics team who were stranded in Budapest after competing in the World Athletics Championships in that city. Some members of the team were reportedly told they would have to wait until Thursday to catch a flight back to the UK.
Meanwhile the UK Transport Secretary, Mark Harper, repudiated rumours that the outage was a hack. “Our technical experts have looked at it and are clear that it wasn’t a cybersecurity incident,” he said. But he promised an independent review into the incident.
One of the airlines’ biggest headaches is crew positioning, as pilots and crew may not exceed their hours. This leaves them unable to work and, in many cases, out of position.
