A cascade of flight cancellations continues to ensue on Tuesday in the aftermath of the air traffic control disruption that rocked the UK on Monday. Airlines are grappling with the aftermath of a four-hour main air traffic control system failure, which caused a considerable upheaval during the recent bank holiday. This outage, attributed to Nats, the national air traffic provider, led to approximately 1,200 flights to and from the UK being cancelled as planes and flight crews were left dislocated.
As the day began, nearly 200,000 individuals found themselves in unintended locations due to this chaos, and the trend of cancellations persisted. Notably, easyJet, the largest budget airline in Britain, has been compelled to ground more than 80 flights on Tuesday. Among these cancellations, three dozen flights originating from Gatwick Airport are affected, notably impacting routes to favoured vacation destinations such as Athens and Venice. The impact was felt across multiple routes, including Athens, Ibiza, and Pisa, and even extending to transatlantic journeys, evident in the cancellations of the Heathrow-Nashville and Gatwick-Tampa flights.
Although National Air Traffic Services (Nats) declared on Monday, at 3:15 pm, that the technical glitch had been identified and rectified, a lingering disruption was anticipated, possibly extending throughout the week. Nats pledged a thorough investigation into the incident to uncover the root causes of the failure.
Thousands of travellers remained stranded on the floors of airports for more than 12 hours, some of them eagerly waiting to rush back home because schools were about to re-open as UK air traffic woes took a toll. Travellers queued for accommodation and waited with baited breaths to see some respite. Asian Voice has learned from those travelling amid this crisis that a woman travelling with an infant was given two different seats, which meant she had to stay apart from her child which is just one unfortunate incident amid many.
Hotels were already booked due to the bank holiday and could only accommodate a limited amount of travellers who were returning after their flights were cancelled. Some were given options to take the next day’s flight and one night stay at a hotel, but many had to face the wrath of irrational allocation of hotels, where couples were given separate hotel rooms to stay in. This led to them cancelling their allotted booking and going ahead with arranging their own accommodation, a rather costly affair with a loss of money. Some travellers had to witness puzzling scenarios where in their allotted accommodation was suddenly full and their wait for settling back in hotels further became tiresome.
“There is going to be some knock-on impact today and I suspect for another few days as airlines get their planes and get their services back to normal,” Harper told the BBC on Tuesday.
Hotels not equipped to deal with chaos
Rupanjana Dutta, Managing Editor, Asian Voice who was slated to travel back to London from Riga, Latvia said, “We were meant to return from Latvia on Monday. After waiting at the airport for 2 hours we were told the flight was cancelled. We were on the way to the business lounge, escorted when we were left with the flight office staff to rebook. We were put on the flight for Wednesday but I was offered a single room in one hotel for one night and my husband in another hotel, as our ticket bookings were made separately. On top of that, I was offered only one night of accommodation though I needed to wait for 2 days to fly back. I was asked to make my own arrangement for the second day, which I was not told before my flight was booked for 2 days later!
“So left without a choice we just went and booked our own hotel and don’t know if we will get any money back for that. We were offered vouchers and taxi drop and pick up service. The taxi never came and we had to make our own arrangements yet again to reach the hotel. We were pretty much left on our own to fend for ourselves.”
A harrowing experience
Bharat Vaswani, another traveller from Britain told the newsweekly, “We were at the boarding gate for our flight to London when the ATU glitch happened. The flight was initially announced as delayed then within an hour cancelled. It has been quite a harrowing experience.
“The airline staff were not prepared and behaved like it was a huge inconvenience for them and were not at all empathetic to the passenger's situation- we've had to reschedule meetings, deliveries and all other things planned. We were given a basic hotel and have been booked to London via Aberdeen the next day. We were at the airport for over 6 hours sorting this.
“We land at a different airport to where our car is parked so will have to now spend over 3 hours to collect our car. During our face-to-face interaction with the airline and subsequent calls to their customer services, we were told that there were no seats on the direct flights to London. This morning while checking in for our flight we were told that the direct morning flight took off with 7 empty seats! Airlines should train their staff better and be prepared for such situations.”
