Thousands of travellers continue to face disruption to their flights the day after a “network-wide failure” hit the UK air traffic control system.
Heathrow airport has warned passengers on Tuesday of “continuing disruption on some routes, including flight cancellations.”
This comes after hundreds of flights got cancelled and delayed on Monday due to a technical issue that struck the UK air traffic control system, causing travel chaos on one of the busiest days of the year.
UK resident Dimitra Raikou and her family saw their easyJet flight from Kos to London cancelled early Tuesday morning, after a number of delays. She has been stranded with her family in Greece, trying to find the next available direct flight, which the booking system said was Sept. 7.
“We feel very frustrated. The airline was so overwhelmed with calls from other passengers, it was impossible to get any information.”
The knock-on impact from Monday’s outage means that holidaymakers and families planning to return to the UK before the start of the school year, will remain stranded abroad until the backlog in the system clears out.
Ms. Raikou had to change her destination from London to Bristol and will be flying on Sept. 3 to avoid missing more work days.
The outage on the August bank holiday affected around one million people, with 3,049 flights due to depart and another 3,054 scheduled to arrive.
Ms. Raikou said that many passengers had to sleep in the airport because local hotels were fully booked.
Travellers won’t be entitled to any cash compensation because the technical issue falls under the category of “extraordinary circumstance” outside of the airlines’ control.
An independent investigation will look into what caused the incident and what can be done to reduce the chances of it happening again.
NATS has apologized for the impact on people’s travel plans and said its engineers will be carefully monitoring the system’s performance as the UK returns to normal operations.
The failure of the air traffic control system meant that the UK was not able to automatically process flight plans, which had to be processed manually instead. This slowed down the operations and restricted the traffic flow to ensure safety.