A “technical fault” affecting air traffic control in the UK airspace caused chaos for many passengers trying to return to the UK after the summer holidays, as well as those trying for a sneaky getaway on bank holiday Monday.
The National Air Traffic Control service, NATS, issued a statement at 12:10 UK time, saying, “We are currently experiencing a technical issue and have applied traffic flow restrictions to maintain safety. Engineers are working to find and fix the fault.”
Subsequent updates confirmed that the UK airspace was still open, but air traffic controllers were having to input flight manually, and so flight volumes had to be reduced in the interest of safety.
At 15:15, UK time, the latest statement read, “We have identified and remedied the technical issue affecting our flight planning system this morning. We are now working closely with airlines and airports to manage the flights affected as efficiently as possible. Our engineers will be carefully monitoring the system’s performance as we return to normal operations”.
They offered further clarification on the reasons for the delays, saying, “The flight planning issue affected the system’s ability to automatically process flight plans, meaning that flight plans had to be processed manually which cannot be done at the same volume, hence the requirement for traffic flow restrictions. Our priority is always to ensure that every flight in the UK remains safe and we are sincerely sorry for the disruption this is causing. Please contact your airline for information on how this may affect your flight”.
Numerous flights to Alicante-Elche airport were showing cancelled, and a similar situation occurred at Corvera, although with fewer scheduled flights.
