UK: Power cut causes ‘widespread disruption’ at Manchester airport, several flights cancelled, delayed

Chaos erupted at the United Kingdom’s Manchester International Airport after a power cut impacted a “significant number of flights” on Sunday (Jun 23) morning prompting authorities to ask all passengers flying from terminals one and two not to travel to the airport.

‘Widespread disruption’

Manchester airport, located in northern England, was hit by a major power cut which caused “widespread disruption,” said Manchester Airports Group, which also operates London Stansted and the East Midlands airports, in a post on social media.

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While the power has been restored, the incident has caused a “significant number of flights” to be cancelled and/or delayed, said the Manchester airport, adding that they were also unable to load the luggage onto some flights due to the disruption.

“Passengers due to fly from terminal 3 should come to the airport as normal unless advised otherwise by their airline, but could be affected by delays,” said the group.

Airport authorities also said that they are working to get passengers already at the airport on their flights as soon as possible to work through some of the backlog.

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The disruption on the UK’s third-busiest airport comes at the beginning of the summer holiday season.

“All of this is happening at a time when aviation is just getting into the peak season, very heavy bookings on flights, and if you knock out a whole load of those, then it’s going to get very messy, and you could find people waiting several days to get where they need to be,” travel expert Simon Calder told Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC).

He also said that there have been “crowds of many thousands of people” waiting for hours as of Sunday morning and no flights are leaving.

The airport, as per the travel expert, was also going to instruct airlines to “cancel a whole swathe of flights for several hours…in a bid to recover the operation later today”.

Situation at the airport

Images and videos from the airport show passengers waiting in long queues with their bags. Some passengers took to X and described the “chaos” that unfolded.

One passenger said that their “baggage thrown on any carousel,” while another said they were “stuck on the plane”.

A video posted on X shows dozens of people waiting in line. The user said that the Manchester airport was “cancelling one flight after another! No communication from staff.”

Notably, the UK’s travel industry has faced a number of disruptions in recent years. Last month, a nationwide outage of immigration e-gates had caused long delays for thousands of passengers.

The incident in May had affected all major airports in the UK including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Edinburgh.

(With inputs from agencies)