Delays from radar blackout ‘could affect flights for days’ as 120 flights cancelled

Thousands of passengers could still be affected after air traffic control (ATC) provider Nats suffered another technical glitch.

More than 120 flights were cancelled with 577,000 passengers affected – the highest number stuck at London’s Heathrow Airport on Wednesday.

The blackout lasted a mere 20 minutes but the knock-on effects could last for days at the peak period for families to escape the UK for summer holidays.

Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, warned ‘continued disruption is expected’ and urged travellers to ‘check with individual airports for advice’.

Nats [National Air Traffic Services], responsible for directing planes through British airspace skies, refused to rule out a cyber attack or hostile foreign interference as causing the chaos, according to The Telegraph.

The ‘technical issue’ occurred at Nats’ control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire, according to the company.

It first announced problems at around 4pm on Wednesday, immediately grounding all flights about to take off.

In an update an hour later, the public-private partnership company said systems were fully operational and that departures had resumed.

An easyJet captain stuck on the tarmac at Gatwick for an hour joked to passengers: ‘They’ve turned it off and turned it back on again.’

But stranded families weren’t laughing as they feared missing funerals, weddings and once-in-a-lifetime holidays.

John Carr, a chiropodist from Stourbridge, was on his way to Norway with a group of friends to help set up his brother’s wedding, for which he is best man, when he found out after checking in that his flight was cancelled.

The 35-year-old said: ‘I’m pretty gutted. We’ve got loads of stuff in the suitcases to set up the venue, because we’re obviously flying to Norway. We’ve got the wedding rehearsal to do. It’s quite stressful.’

He said they did not receive any warning of the cancellation before it happened.

‘We had no idea,’ Mr Carr said.

‘There was nothing that the airport had said out on the speaker phones, or anything like that. There was no warning from them or the airline that said it was cancelled. It’s rubbish. There’s nothing we can do.

‘We don’t know what we’re going to do tonight in terms of accommodation.

‘We have put our cars in special car compounds for the next six days.’

Airlines were equally furious at the disruption after a similar 2023 failure cost carriers £100million.

EasyJet’s chief operating officer David Morgan said: ‘It’s extremely disappointing to see an ATC failure once again causing disruption to our customers at this busy and important time of year for travel.

‘While our priority today is supporting our customers, we will want to understand from Nats what steps they are taking to ensure issues don’t continue.’

Ryanair called for Nats’ chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign in the wake of the fault, claiming ‘no lessons have been learnt’ since the August 2023 system outage.

The airline’s chief operating officer Neal McMahon said: ‘It is outrageous that passengers are once again being hit with delays and disruption due to Martin Rolfe’s continued mismanagement of Nats.

‘It is clear that no lessons have been learnt since the August 2023 Nats system outage, and passengers continue to suffer as a result of Martin Rolfe’s incompetence.’

More than 700,000 passengers suffered disruption when flights were grounded at UK airports on August 28 2023 when Nats suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.

Mr McMahon continued: ‘If Nats CEO Martin Rolfe fails to resign on the back of this latest Nats system outage that has disrupted thousands of passengers yet again, then UK transport minister Heidi Alexander must act without delay to remove Martin Rolfe and deliver urgent reform of Nats’ shambolic ATC service, so that airlines and passengers are no longer forced to endure these preventable delays caused by persistent Nats failures.’

The Department for Transport (DfT) noted that the Transport Secretary does not have any direct control over Nats and has no powers on staffing decisions.

The Liberal Democrats called for a full investigation into the glitch.

The party’s leader Sir Ed Davey, said: ‘It is utterly unacceptable that after a major disruption just two years ago, air traffic control has once again been hit by a technical fault.

‘The Government should launch an urgent investigation to ensure the system is fit for purpose, including ruling out hostile action as a cause.’

A DfT spokesperson said the department is ‘working closely’ with Nats to understand the cause of the glitch and the ‘implications for the resilience systems in place’.