Passengers across Europe were stranded during the peak holiday season when planes were diverted, some turning around mid-air to return to their departure cities because of a 20-minute glitch.
Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Manchester Airports were all among the airports hit by the outage that left many aircraft and flight crew out of position.
Musicians entertained passengers at Heathrow airport (Simon Calder)
Take-offs for thousands of passengers were cancelled because inbound flights had turned back.
In some cases, travellers were held on planes on the tarmac with no news of when their flight might take off, or even after landing.
Flights to destinations including Marseille, Lyon, Brussels, Glasgow, Newcastle, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Berlin, Frankfurt and Basel were cancelled.
Some planes scheduled to arrive at UK airports were forced to conduct holding patterns or divert elsewhere.
The disruption, which began just after 4pm on Wednesday, was down to a “technical issue” at the control centre of ATC provider Nats in Swanwick, Hampshire, the company said.
Flight analytics experts Cirium said that by 5.30pm, 80 flights to and from the UK had been cancelled.
British Airways, which was the airline hardest hit, restricted Heathrow inbound and outbound flights to 32 an hour until 7.15pm before volumes returned to their usual 45 an hour, creating a backlog.
Passengers queued at Heathrow (PA)
Almost all BA flights on Wednesday evening were delayed, with at least a dozen encountering delays of two hours or more: to places including Chicago, New York JFK, Pittsburgh, Valencia, Prague, Nice, Edinburgh and Belfast City.
Heathrow’s night curfew was expected to be lifted to allow airlines to get their schedules back to normal.
But the disruption left passengers upset. John Carr, from Stourbridge, was worried his flight cancellation would force him to miss his brother’s wedding in Norway, for which he was best man.
Mr Carr, 35, 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….
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