Transport secretary grills air control boss as he faces calls to resign after flight chaos

The head of the UK’s air traffic control firm was called in for a meeting with the transport secretary after a fault left tens of thousands of summer holidaymakers facing grounded flights on Wednesday.

- ARCHIE MITCHELL

Passengers across Europe were stranded during the peak holiday season when planes were cancelled and diverted - with some turning around midair to return to their departure cities - because of a 20-minute glitch.

And Heidi Alexander has held an urgent meeting with National Air Traffic Services (Nats) boss Martin Rolfe to discuss his handling of the chaos.

Ms Alexander said the meeting would help her “understand what happened and how we can prevent reoccurrence”. Following the talks, she said the incident was an “isolated event and there is no evidence of malign activity”.

It comes after Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Manchester airports were among those hit by the outage that left many aircraft and flight crews out of position.

Takeoffs for thousands of passengers were cancelled because inbound flights had turned back. In some cases, travellers were held on planes on the tarmac with no news of when their flight might take off.

The disruption, which began just after 4pm on Wednesday, was down to a “technical issue” at the control centre of ATC provider Nats in Swanwick, Hampshire, the company said. It is understood Nats systems were down for around 20 minutes, with the company issuing an apology to all those affected by the issue. Flight analytics experts Cirium said that by 5.30pm, 80 flights to and from the UK had been cancelled.