Thousands of airline passengers are waking up where they did not intend to be after the temporary shutdown of UK airspace on Wednesday.
The latest failure at Nats, the main air traffic control provider, led to dozens of diversions and cancellations – particularly affecting London Heathrow and Gatwick airports.
British Airways has cancelled a number of flights this morning to Heathrow, while easyJet says it has been rebooking disrupted passengers on alternative flights after multiple cancellations. Ryanair has once again called for the resignation of the Nats chief executive.
These are the key questions and answers.
What went wrong?
At around 4pm on Thursday 31 June, Nats said “a technical issue” at its Swanwick air traffic control centre in Hampshire meant it was “limiting the number of aircraft flying in the London control area in order to ensure safety.”
Across in Brussels, Eurocontrol – which coordinates air traffic control across Europe – was rather more specific, saying London’s airspace was “temporarily unavailable.” A radar failure was responsible.
The fault appears to have been fixed within 40 minutes, but the disruption continues into Thursday, with at least 15 more cancellations of flights to and from London’s airports.
Delays are stretching to 20 hours for some passengers on European flights. EasyJet passengers from Chania in Crete to London Gatwick whose flight was diverted to Zurich had to spend the night in the Swiss city because the crew ran out of hours. They are expected to fly back at lunchtime, around 20 hours late. The aircraft was due to be operating the 6am departure from Gatwick to Lanzarote, which has been delayed for nine hours – along with the inbound flight. In addition, the long delay of outbound flights to destinations such as Dubai, Doha and Singapore means thousands of passengers missed onward connections.
Why did a brief failure have such an impact?
Because there is so little slack in the system. London handles far more airline passengers than any other city in the world.
Heathrow and Gatwick – which had dozens of diversions and cancellations between them – are particularly stretched. Gatwick is the planet’s busiest single runway airport, with landings and…
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