This Wednesday, air traffic is still disrupted in the United Kingdom on the back of a serious technical outage that affected the authority responsible for air traffic control, with more than 2,000 flights cancelled, the latest episode in a series of similar incidents in recent years.
According to the aviation data specialist Cirium, 1,746 flights were cancelled on Tuesday because of the incident. About 327 more were cancelled on Wednesday by midday, most of them at London Heathrow Airport. That brings the total to 2,073 cancellations.
“We sat on the plane for a little over five hours. Then, around 6:30 p.m., all the airport’s aircraft disembarked at the same time. And it turned into a gigantic and chaotic scene,” recalls Matt Ernster, 28, who is due to return to Boston after a honeymoon trip to Paris, with a layover at Heathrow.
“The escalators broke down. Everyone was stuck in a huge queue of thousands of people just to reach the customs checks. And there, the customs, it was another hour, two hours of waiting,” he continues.
Unable to find a hotel on Tuesday night, this passenger decided around midnight to sleep in the airport “beside the elevators leading to the boarding gate”.
The outage occurred on Tuesday afternoon, according to the air traffic control body NATS, which said around 7:30 p.m. local time (6:30 p.m. GMT) that it had “resolved” the malfunction.
According to Neal McMahon, Ryanair’s chief operating officer, the low-cost airline canceled a total of 250 flights, a cost that is expected to run into the millions.
It is worth noting that at Heathrow Airport, many passengers were still waiting in the morning to be able to board, some sleeping on the floor surrounded by their luggage.
