Why are flights cancelled at Heathrow and Gatwick? Inquest begins into aviation chaosAn urgent investigation is being carried out by the National Air Traffic Services to identify what went so disastrously wrong at Britain’s airports
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Nicholas Cecil, Chief Reporter @nicholascecil2 minutes ago
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Furious passengers are demanding to know what caused the flights chaos at Britain’s airports.
The National Air Traffic Services is urgently carrying out an investigation to identify what went so disastrously wrong, leading to hundreds of flights being cancelled at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and other airports.
Its engineers identified that the problem was in its flight processing system.
NATS put in a “fix” on Tuesday afternoon as the flights crisis grew.
But in a statement at 7.30pm that evening, it admitted: “Recovery from today’s system issue has taken longer than we had hoped.
Delayed passengers wait and queue with their luggage at Terminal 3 of London Heathrow airportAFP/Getty
“Our system issue is now resolved, we are operating normally and working as hard as possible to clear the backlog of flights.”
The computer problem meant that flights were stopped from taking off from airports.
The impact of this situation led to Heathrow and other airports running out of parking places for planes.
Hundreds of flights were cancelled or delayed.
Some planes had to be diverted to other airports including Edinburgh and Cardiff.
The impact on passengers is going to last days as they seek to rebook cancelled flights or try to find another way to get to their planned destination.
Heathrow ran out of parking slots for planes as aircraft were unable to take off due to the air traffic control problemPA Wire
NATS did not go into detail about precisely what caused the problem.
But Ryanair’s chief operating officer said the aviation chaos was due to “exactly the same issue” as a problem in 2023.
In August 2023, more than 700,000 passengers experienced disruption when flights were grounded at UK airports when NATS suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.
“NATS told us it was a flight planning processing failure, which is exactly the same issue that happened in 2023,” Neal McMahon told Times Radio.
“If you remember in 2023 there was an issue with a flight plan, and it sent the system in a loop that eventually caused it to shut down.
“We’re told that that was a rogue flight plan and we’re told yesterday this was a spurious flight plan which caused the same outage and our question is like: these things can happen, but where’s the backup systems?”
An arrivals board at Terminal 5 Heathrow, after flights were cancelled on Tuesday because of a UK air traffic control issuePA
However, NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe, who is facing calls to resign over the latest flights crisis, suggested the cause was different from the one which sparked disruption three years ago.
“My focus and that of the team has been on both getting our system operating back up normally, which it is now, but there’s obviously a huge tail to the disruption and we’ll be working on that through the course of today,” he told BBC radio on Wednesday.
“And then our attention will turn to exactly what’s happened in this particular incident.
“What I will say is I don’t believe we’ve ever seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation.”
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Mr Rolfe, who was summoned to see Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander on Wednesday morning, has ruled out a cyber attack.
“Inevitably, things do go wrong in complex systems,” he added.
“We had everybody on site, everybody was in the right place. We had all the engineers in place. We had our various partners from software industries all on hand.
“So this was resolved as quickly as it could be, but within the limits of making sure that it all stayed safe.”
His words, though, will do little to defuse the anger of many passengers caught up in the travel chaos.
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