Airlines criticise air traffic control as second glitch causes more disruption

• Published

Airlines have criticised the UK's air traffic control system after a second technical problem in two weeks caused major disruption to UK flights

EasyJet said Monday's incident "once again calls into question the resilience" of how the service works, while Wizz Air said there was a "national confidence crisis" in National Air Traffic Services (Nats), which runs the UK's air traffic.

The technical problem at Prestwick in Ayrshire caused disruption at airports across Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England, delaying dozens of flights.

Nats said a "connectivity issue" was to blame for the disruption, and that it had "nothing to do" with a separate software defect at Swanwick that led to the cancellation of 2,000 flights earlier in September.

The underlying issue causing Monday's disruption has since been resolved, with Nats saying it was running at "full capacity" although officials warned of knock-on effects.

A spokesperson said they were now "focused on working with our customers to recover their residual delays and help get their operations back to normal".

According to aviation analytics company Cirium, as of 13:45 BST, at least 200 flights had been cancelled or did not fly on Monday. This includes 100 flights scheduled to arrive in the UK and 99 that were due to depart from the UK.

Easyjet was the worst affected airline, with 47 of its 670 scheduled departures cancelled, while British Airways has seen 11 cancellations from its 513 scheduled departures.

The UK Civil Aviation Authority said passengers who had flights disrupted were "unlikely" to be entitled to compensation.

It said the technical issue is "likely to be considered the result of 'extraordinary circumstances' under passenger rights rules", meaning that "although passengers should be looked after by airlines, they are unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident".

Industry representative body Airlines UK said both passengers and airlines "deserve better" service after "yet another Nats failure".

Managing director of Wizz Air UK, Yvonne Moynihan, called for "urgent reform" of Nats, adding that she did not have confidence in its current leadership.

When asked by BBC Radio 4's World at One programme whether Nats chief Martin Rolfe should resign, Moynihan said: "We need to look at the leadership at the top. But more than that, what are the board of directors doing?"

Jet2 boss Steve Heapy called for "urgent and accountable" action to bolster the UK's air traffic control infrastructure.

Ryanair reiterated its calls for Rolfe to resign, saying he had failed to deliver" either a reliable system or an effective back-up". The latest outage affected 140 of the airline's flights and 25,000 passengers.

British Airways said "yet another technical fault with Nats" was "disappointing".

• Flight chaos caused by 'millisecond' software defect, report says - Published2 days ago

A Nats spokesperson apologised for the disruption, saying: "In the real world, we accept technology can and sometimes does fail. Our job is minimising disruption where possible.

"What isn't acceptable is any incident where safety is compromised - this is always our first priority."

They added that it was working to return air traffic to normal as quickly as possible and urged passengers to check their flight status with their airline.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander acknowledged the problems with flights were "deeply frustrating" for passengers.

Steve Davies, 74, told the BBC he was "cheesed off with air traffic control" as technical issues with its systems seemed to be "happening a lot".

He and his wife Sadie became stuck at Birmingham airport after being told to disembark their easyJet flight to Edinburgh on Monday morning.

Nicole McCloskey, from Kilmarnock, had been due to go to Disneyland Paris with her family before their flight was cancelled.

She told the BBC her family got a message to say the flight was delayed while they were travelling to Glasgow airport, but only found out it had been grounded altogether once they arrived.

Nicole said they have been rebooked on another flight on later on Monday and were hopeful "it's sorted in time".

Not much is known about what caused the latest Nats problems, except that there was a technical failure at its control centre in Prestwick, which looks after traffic across northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, catering for about 42% of the UK's air traffic.

The other Nats centre at Swanwick in Hampshire looks after airspace in the southern part of the UK, including the approaches to Heathrow and Gatwick.

The Swanwick incident last month affected hundreds of thousands of passengers, with some sleeping on airport floors or getting stuck overseas earlier this month.

That disruption was much more severe as it affected intercontinental and long-haul travel via UK airspace.

Nats said in a report last week that the software glitch happened "in the space of a millisecond" leading to the system producing corrupted data.

However, the fact that the UK's air traffic control system has suffered two significant issues in a short space of time has attracted a great deal of criticism, and the pressure on Nats boss Martin Rolfe - who insisted last week he would not resign - is only likely to mount.

Rolfe told the BBC at the time he would not resign, saying the software defect was "very, very obscure".

"My job is to make sure that we have this happen as infrequently as possible," he said.

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