LONDON — Thousands of travelers faced flight delays and uncertainty on Monday as the UK’s air traffic control system was hit by technical problems that led to the cancellation of at least 500 flights to and from UK airports.
Britain’s National Air Traffic Service (NATS) said in a statement to CBS News that a technical problem on Monday, the end of a long weekend and one of the busiest bank holidays of the year, caused restrictions on air travel in and out of the United Kingdom for travel, amid reports of widespread delays in flights from popular holiday destinations to London.
BBC News reported that more than 230 flights departing from the UK and at least 271 flights originally scheduled to arrive in the UK have been cancelled
Passengers queue at Gatwick Airport as electronic passport controls break down across the UK on May 27, 2023 in Crawley, England. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
“We are currently experiencing a technical issue and have implemented traffic restrictions to ensure safety. Engineers are working to find and fix the error,” a spokesman for NATS said.
Scottish airline Loganair previously said on social media that there had been a network-wide outage of UK air traffic control computer systems and warned international flights could be affected.
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CBS News producer Emmet Lyons said he was stuck on an airstrip on the Spanish island of Mallorca and the pilot on his return flight to the UK told all passengers they were being held indefinitely due to a serious problem with air traffic control that United Kingdom
Speaking to the BBC, Alistair Rosenschein, an aviation consultant and former British Airways Boeing 747 pilot, said it appeared the entire air traffic control system was down across the UK, with the country shut down.
“The disruptions are huge and customers all over the world [will] “If the delay is particularly long, they have to be accommodated in hotels,” he added. “It’s really a nightmare scenario.”
More than 6,000 flights were scheduled to and from the UK on Monday, according to the BBC.
Michele Robson, a former air traffic controller, said technical problems like this usually last “only a few hours”, making Monday’s shutdown “unusual”.
“At this point nobody really knows how long it’s going to be,” she told BBC News.
“This morning there was a flight planning system outage affecting both centers in the UK,” Robson said while waiting for a flight from the small British island of Jersey to London.
“It looks as if there has been what is known as a ‘zero rate’, meaning no aircraft can fly into, or likely to fly out of, the UK. Generally they would try to land things that were already in the UK air.”