HOLIDAYMAKERS could be facing days of travel chaos after a tech glitch led to the grounding of flights across the UK yesterday.
Several major airports were forced to stop flights taking off and landing because of a system outage in the air traffic control (ATC) network, operated by Nats (National Air Traffic Services).
Passengers were left sleeping on the floors of airports as more than 150 flights were cancelled, with disruption expected to continue for multiple days as airlines work to restore their services to normal.
However, it is still not clear what caused the technical glitch in the ATC system - which took 20 minutes to resolve.
Airlines are also asking how one seemingly small error could cause such chaos in such a short period of time.
London Heathrow Airport - the busiest in Europe - saw the worst of the disruption yesterday, with 46 flights being cancelled.
This morning, ten flights to and from the airport were cancelled.
EasyJet’s chief operating officer David Morgan said: “It’s extremely disappointing to see an ATC failure once again causing disruption to our customers at this busy and important time of year for travel.
“While our priority today is supporting our customers, we will want to understand from Nats what steps they are taking to ensure issues don’t continue.”
Ryanair called for Nats’ chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign in the wake of the fault, claiming “no lessons have been learnt” since the August 2023 system outage.
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