A BBC star is scrambling to reach her own wedding after her flight to Italy was cancelled amid the air traffic control chaos.
BBC Radio 2’s Charlotte Simpson and her fiancé are among thousands caught up in the crisis, as exhausted travellers were left stranded and sleeping on airport floors overnight.
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The couple were due to fly from Gatwick to Bari in southern Italy yesterday afternoon ahead of their wedding on Saturday.
But their British Airways flight was axed yesterday, leaving Charlotte clutching her wedding dress while her fiancé carried his suit through the airport chaos.
The newsreader described the scenes as “incredibly chaotic”, while her husband-to-be branded them “pandemonium”.
The couple’s ordeal came as hundreds more flights were cancelled on the second day of disruption caused by a technical failure at National Air Traffic Services (NATS).
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The glitch hit NATS’ flight processing system and created a huge backlog across the aviation network.
NATS has since implemented a fix and said its flight system was “starting to recover”.
But airlines are still scrambling to reposition aircraft and crew left in the wrong places after yesterday’s meltdown.
Charlotte documented the nightmare experience in a post on the BBC’s Instagram page.
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She explained: “So we are on our way to our wedding in Bari in the South of Italy, we were meant to be leaving at 5.15pm.
“I have got my wedding dress, my fiance has his suit.”
But after the BA flight was cancelled, the pair were left waiting in baggage reclaim for their luggage.
Charlotte said: “But unfortunately our BA flight was cancelled and we have been waiting in baggage reclaim, it is now quarter to eight, so the past two and a half hours, and there is no sign of our bags anywhere.
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“It has been incredibly chaotic. There are piles of bags everywhere, and yeah all the bags were sent to one belt.”
She said passengers from grounded flights had all been directed to the same baggage belt.
Charlotte continued: “All the grounded flights were sent to one belt, I am not really sure why, but that’s why there has been this absolute chaos. People everywhere.”
Her fiancé added: “The only way I could describe it is pandemonium.”
Charlotte said staff at Gatwick had told them they were trying to get the situation sorted.
The couple have since managed to book a new flight for today and are “hopeful” they will make it to Italy in time for their big day.
Their nightmare comes as the wider crisis continues to wreak havoc for travellers across Britain.
Aviation analytics firm Cirium said 291 flights had been cancelled at UK airports so far on Wednesday.
It said 120 were departures and 171 were arrivals, accounting for around five per cent of the 5,869 flights scheduled.
A normal day sees cancellations of between one and two per cent of flights, according to the firm.
British Airways has also revealed the full scale of the impact on its network.
The airline said 198 flights scheduled for Wednesday had so far been cancelled after yesterday’s disruption left aircraft and crew “out of place”.
BA said it had worked “throughout the night” to build a new flight schedule but was “left with no choice” but to cancel further flights.
It has now confirmed that 349 of its flights were cancelled on Tuesday, up from the 260 previously reported.
BA said the incident was “completely outside of our control” but apologised to the “tens of thousands” of customers affected.
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Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe said there would be a “very, very thorough investigation” into the technical problem.
He also ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of the outage.