UK Flight Chaos Spills Into Second Day After Tech Outage
Air travelers in the UK faced a second day of severe disruptions after a technical glitch at a key node forced Heathrow Airport and other hubs to cancel hundreds of flights, adding to similar incidents in recent years that have tested the resilience of the country’s aviation infrastructure.
British Airways scrapped almost 200 flights on Wednesday because aircraft and crew were out of position, the UK flagship carrier said in a statement. In total, about 291 flights representing about 5% of the 5,869 scheduled, didn’t take place, according to Cirium data. On Tuesday, airports in the UK suffered more than 1,750 flight cancelations, Cirium said.
The spillover shows the complexity involved in restarting operations after the severe outage, with about 8,000 flights using the UK air space on average each day. Heavy disruptions mean that aircraft and crew are out of position and extra flights need to be deployed to clear the backlog of stranded passengers.
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Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, said that while operations are recovering, travelers should expect knock-on impacts as aircraft and crew reposition. The airport said it has additional colleagues on hand to support across Heathrow’s terminals to rebuild the service.
“We’ve got a lot of aircraft that were dispersed across Europe,” Nigel Wicking, chief executive officer of Heathrow Airline Operators Committee, said during a transport committee meeting. “They’re going to find it very difficult to get back into the UK today because there aren’t that many ad hoc slots available at Heathrow for them to get back in.”
Gatwick Airport, the other main hub for London, said in a statement that “we still anticipate that it will take time for our operations to fully return to normal.”
Tuesday’s outage was related to a technical issue at NATS, a public-private company based in Swanwick, Hampshire, that oversees air traffic control in the UK. The government ruled out a cyber attack.
The service provider said in a statement that “this has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover.”
Outages have become a routine problem in the UK. Last summer, an unspecified radar-related issue shut down the country’s airspace. Another NATS glitch three years ago halted air traffic in the country and left planes, crews and passengers stranded.
Martin Rolfe, the chief executive officer of NATS, was at the helm of the air-traffic control provider during each of these past glitches. Airlines including Ryanair Holdings Plc and Wizz Air Holdings Plc have repeatedly called for him to resign, with Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary on Wednesday calling him “an overpaid failure.”
“We will be doing a very thorough and full investigation,” Rolfe told BBC Radio 4’s Today program. “Not to take away any of the frustrations and disappointments from the people who haven’t been able to travel, but we do have one of the best systems and one of the best services in the world.”
Rolfe, who has been CEO for more than 11 years, is set to meet with UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander on Wednesday to discuss the IT failure. The UK government holds a 49% stake plus a blocking share in NATS, while airlines, airport operator LHR Airports Limited and NATS staff fund the rest.
The NATS Swanwick operations room manages the en-route airspace over England and Wales up to the Scottish border, as well as lower-altitude traffic to and from London’s airports, equal to about 2.5 million flights or 250 million passengers in the UK airspace.
Heathrow suffered its worst disruption in decades early last year after a nearby fire cut power to the hub and brought travel to a standstill for hundreds of thousands of passengers. The airport in the southwest of London, handles roughly 1,400 flights and 200,000 passengers every day, and about 40aircraft take off every hour at peak times on average.
The disruption adds to complex operations particularly for Middle East carriers like Emirates or Qatar Airways that have seen their services come under strain in recent months because of the Iran War. Heathrow is among the busiest hubs for carriers from the Persian Gulf, with Emirates alone operating about a dozen flights to London airports a day, many on its mammoth Airbus SE A380 aircraft.
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