Dozens of flights cancelled after air traffic control glitch

An air traffic control fault left tens of thousands of summer holidaymakers facing the chaos of grounded planes and suspended takeoffs yesterday.

- JANE DALTON

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

Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Manchester airports were among the airports hit by the outage that left many aircraft and flight crew 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.

Flights to destinations including Marseille, Lyon, Brussels, Glasgow, Newcastle, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Berlin, Frankfurt and Basel were cancelled.

Some planes scheduled to arrive at UK airports were forced to conduct holding patterns or divert elsewhere.

The disruption, which began just after 4pm yesterday, was down to a “technical issue” at the control centre of ATC provider Nats in Swanwick, Hampshire, the company said.

Flight analytics experts Cirium said that by 5.30pm, 80 flights to and from the UK had been cancelled.

British Airways, which was the airline hardest hit, restricted Heathrow inbound and outbound flights to 32 an hour until 7.15pm before volumes returned to their usual 45 an hour, creating a backlog.