In the aftermath of a heavily disrupted day at UK airports due to a “technical glitch”, “there will be a full investigation to get to the bottom of an issue of such magnitude”, said , Tuesday, August 29, Mark Harper, the British transport minister, stating that there had not been a similar incident “for almost a decade”. These disruptions have led to delays and cancellations at airports, all the more damaging for the British as many were counting on this Monday August 28 holiday to return to the United Kingdom.
The Minister clarified that it was “not a cyberattack”, but “a technical fault in the flight plan system”. This “flaw” forced airline agents to manually re-enter flight plans, resulting in numerous delays and chain cancellations. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has blasted an “unacceptable” outage which forced the Irish carrier to cancel 250 flights on Monday and 70 on Tuesday, out of a total of 3,200 planned.
“It is not acceptable that NATS”, the British air traffic control authority, “allows its computer systems to fail and therefore everyone’s flights are cancelled”, the leader raged in a video posted on the Ryanair account of X (ex-Twitter).
On Monday evening (8:30 p.m. French time), the director of operations of the NATS apologized and clarified that “the automatic system which allows the tracking of all planes and all routes was not working. We have therefore, in order to manage control in a secure manner, limited the number of flights (…). Our top priority is safety and we will be investigating very thoroughly to find out what happened today. »
‘Hundreds’ of affected flights
A spokesperson for NATS was unable on Tuesday to give Agence France-Presse a precise figure for canceled flights, delays or affected travelers, limiting himself to speaking of “hundreds” of affected flights and several days needed to return to normal and bring all travelers home.
“We should have flown directly from Orlando to Gatwick Airport in London, but our flight got canceled so we had to be rerouted to Texas to get a flight [to London],” said a traveler interviewed by the AFP.
On the X social network, many complained of being stuck far from home after having their flight canceled while sitting on the plane for hours, or after a day and a half of waiting at the airport. ‘airport. “Currently on a plane on the tarmac at Budapest airport,” wrote BBC presenter Gabby Logan, who was covering the World Athletics Championships in Hungary last week. “We have just been told that the airspace is closed. We could stay there for twelve hours,” she wrote on X.
Distraught travelers have complained that they have not had a new flight offered for several days, when their company suggests that they buy a ticket to return faster, but at high prices.
