After hitting technical snag, UK flight chaos likely to last for days

London, United Kingdom

Thousands of passengers with flight tickets in the United Kingdom are facing cancellations and long delays after the country's air traffic control systems encountered a “technical issue”, which has been fixed.

People have been stranded in the UK and abroad after the number of planes landing was limited by the National Air Traffic Services. The airports and airlines warned the passengers that they were likely to face more "significant delays" even though the officials fixed the issue within hours.

Speaking to BBC News, one passenger said that her afternoon flight was not likely to leave till after midnight. Warnings have been issued that people are likely to face some knock-on disruption for days.

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Delays of around 12 hours after takeoffs, suspension of inbound flights due to a “network-wide” computer failure and cancellations were faced by returning holidaymakers and those planning to fly out from UK airports.

The technical snag had forced controllers to input flight plans manually which led to the cancellation of 500 flights and delay of other flights even before Nats, which is the national airspace controller, declared at 3.15 pm local time that it had “identified and remedied” the technical issue after four hours.

Returning to normal operations

As per flight tracking sites, the flights were delayed from 11:30 am. The problem was confirmed by Nats at around 12:10 pm local time when it stated that it was “currently experiencing a technical issue” and had “applied traffic flow restrictions to maintain safety”.

After stating that the original issues had been fixed, Nats stated, “We are now working closely with airlines and airports to manage the flights affected as efficiently as possible. Our engineers will be carefully monitoring the system’s performance as we return to normal operations.”

“Our priority is always to ensure that every flight in the UK remains safe and we are sincerely sorry for the disruption this is causing. Please contact your airline for information on how this may affect your flight,” it added.

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Late on Monday evening, Heathrow said that the flight schedules remain disrupted and hence, people should reach out to the airlines before leaving for the airport.

Heathrow spokesperson said that the schedules would “remain significantly disrupted for the rest of the day”. “We ask passengers to only travel to the airport if their flight is confirmed as still operating. Teams across Heathrow are working as hard as they can to minimise the knock-on impacts and assist those whose journeys have been affected,” he added. 

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