Heathrow Airport suspended arrivals for the rest of Tuesday after an air traffic control issue disrupted hundreds of flights across the UK. Departures resumed later in the day, but Heathrow said disruption was still expected.
The shutdown landed in the middle of the busiest part of the day for a system already under strain, and the knock-on effects spread fast. Ryanair said more than 65,000 passengers were delayed by up to eight hours, while British Airways warned of significant knock-on impacts for customers and colleagues.
Nats said recovery was taking longer than hoped, even though the incident had been fixed by Tuesday evening. That left airports and airlines trying to rebuild schedules while passengers were still moving through a system with a backlog of flights and aircraft in the wrong place across Europe.
Martin Rolfe said Nats' systems were fit for purpose, but he also acknowledged that there was, of course, a huge backlog and that the systems had probably not been working properly for about six hours. He said Nats was having a full investigation into what went wrong, which means the question now is less about whether the network can recover than how quickly it can clear the disruption it already created.
Manchester Airport and East Midlands Airport said they expected a full flight schedule to operate on Wednesday, though both warned of disruption for the rest of Tuesday. Bristol Airport said flights were arriving and departing again. The immediate crisis was easing, but the damage was already done: hundreds of flights were cancelled or delayed, and the recovery was still only beginning.
