Technical issue at air traffic control provider Nats leads to over 1,300 flight cancellations to and from UK airports; oil prices rise towards $100 a barrel for first time since July
The UK cannot have a repeat of the travel disruption seen at airports, the foreign secretary has said.
Asked about the flight chaos, Ed Miliband told BBC Breakfast:
First of all, I want to apologise to all of the passengers who have faced disruption.
This is frankly unacceptable. It was a problem at the National Air Traffic Service, but we can’t have this happen again.
Frankly, we’ve got to have our airports running smoothly and properly, without those problems, and that is what the transport secretary will be asking for from the head of the National Air Traffic Service.
I’d like to start, as you might expect, by apologising to everyone who’s been impacted by the issue that we had yesterday.
In terms of the recovery, I absolutely understand the frustration. There is nothing we hate more than delaying people, and not allowing them to get to their destination. It disrupts airports and disrupts airlines. And we absolutely take accountability and responsibility for that. That is our job. But our job is also to make sure that people stay safe. We never do this lightly.
We will be doing a very, very thorough and full investigation. We have at this point ruled out cyber. We don’t believe it was a cyber attack.
Obviously 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.
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 and so on, 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.