Airlines have demanded answers from the air traffic control (ATC) provider NATS after a system outage grounded flights across the UK.<\/p>\n
NATS, which has apologised, said it had taken 20 minutes to resolve the issue by switching to a back-up system.<\/p>\n
It resulted in more than 150 flights being cancelled and thousands more being grounded on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Ten flights on Thursday morning to and from Heathrow Airport were cancelled \u2013 four departures and six arrivals, according to the airport\u2019s website.<\/p>\n
EasyJet said the error was \u201cextremely disappointing\u201d while one of Ryanair\u2019s bosses called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign.<\/p>\n
According to NATS, the issue was \u201cradar-related\u201d and it reduced flight traffic to ensure safety. It added there was no evidence the incident had been cyber-related.<\/p>\n
The government said it was \u201cworking closely\u201d with NATS to understand what had gone wrong.<\/p>\n
Ryanair executive Neal McMahon said it was \u201coutrageous that passengers were once again being hit with delays and disruption due to Martin Rolfe\u2019s continued mismanagement\u201d of NATS.<\/p>\n
Referring to a previous incident two years ago, Mr McMahon said it was clear \u201cno lessons\u201d had been learnt and passengers continued to \u201csuffer\u201d as a result of Mr Rolfe\u2019s \u201cincompetence\u201d.<\/p>\n
In August 2023, more than 700,000 passengers were affected by the cancellation of more than 500 flights at the UK\u2019s busiest airports due to a major outage.<\/p>\n
EasyJet\u2019s chief operating officer, David Morgan, said: \u201cIt\u2019s extremely disappointing to see an ATC failure once again causing disruption to our customers at this busy and important time of year for travel.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will want to understand from NATS what steps they are taking to ensure issues don\u2019t continue,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m feeling pretty angry,\u201d said Sarah McPherson whose son was meant to compete with England\u2019s under 15 boys international touch rugby team in Ireland. \u201cHe is so very disappointed and at this stage we don\u2019t know if there will be another flight,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Jonathan Carr from Stourbridge was trying to get to Norway for his brother\u2019s wedding. He told the BBC it was \u201cstressful\u201d that his flight was cancelled but he hoped to arrive in Bod\u00f8 late on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really frustrating,\u201d said Julia Lo Bue-Said chief executive of Advantage Travel Partnership. \u201cWe need to ensure there\u2019s sufficient resilience built into critical infrastructure that doesn\u2019t impact businesses, that doesn\u2019t impact travellers.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to flight data firm Cirium, 84 departures and 71 arrivals were cancelled across all UK airports. That equates to 3% of all departures and 2% of all arrivals.<\/p>\n
In addition a number of flights had to be diverted to European airports, it said.<\/p>\n
Cirium does not attribute causes for cancellations, so some may not have been due to the air traffic outage.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Airlines have demanded answers from the air traffic control (ATC) provider NATS after a system outage grounded flights across the UK. NATS, which has apologised, said it had taken 20 minutes to resolve the issue by switching to a back-up system. It resulted in more than 150 flights being cancelled and thousands more being grounded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}