Air travel meltdown in UK: 1,300 flights cancelled, thousands of passengers hit

Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 said on X, “All told, 1300 flights were canceled to/from airports in the UK on Tuesday.”

The disruption continued into Wednesday, with Flightradar24 reporting that 177 flights had been cancelled so far, nearly all of them at London Heathrow Airport.

Britain’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) said earlier that a technical issue had caused the widespread disruption.

In its latest statement, NATS said work was continuing to help airlines and airports recover from the disruption.

“Work is continuing to assist airlines and airports recover from today’s disruption. This has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover. We apologise again for the disruption caused,” NATS said.

In a separate statement, NATS said the system glitch had been resolved and that operations had returned to normal, while efforts were underway to clear the backlog of flights.

NATS CEO Martin Rolfe told Sky News that he was apologising “unreservedly” and accepting responsibility for what he described as an “unfortunate day”.

According to The Guardian, the disruption was first reported at around 1 p.m. on Tuesday and affected departing flights at several of Britain’s busiest airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted.

The disruption affected more than 65,000 Ryanair passengers and led to the cancellation of more than 50 scheduled flights, according to the airline.

Ryanair subsequently called for NATS CEO Martin Rolfe to resign, accusing the air traffic control provider of repeated system failures.

Ryanair COO Neal McMahon said: “How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe, accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns?”

He added that more than three years after NATS’ 2023 system meltdown, UK passengers were once again facing delays of up to eight hours because of what he described as a “critical NATS ATC system failure”.

“Families travelling on holiday, people travelling for work and thousands of visitors to the UK have once again paid the price for NATS’ abhorrent failure,” McMahon said.

“The astonishing part is that NATS continues to charge airlines and passengers more each year while delivering a worse service. Following the 2023 collapse, we were told lessons would be learned. We were told ‘resilience would improve’. We were told the systems had been fixed. Yet here we are again,” he added.

McMahon also criticised Rolfe’s compensation, claiming that the NATS CEO receives more than £1.4 million in bonuses annually while the organisation continues to face operational failures.

British Airways said it had been forced to cancel more than 100 flights on Tuesday. The airline offered affected passengers free rebooking until Friday.

Airports heavily affected by the disruption included London Stansted and London City, as well as airports in Manchester, Birmingham, Gatwick and Scotland.