Travel chaos hits British Airways flyers after system outage

• British Airways cancelled about 550 flights over two days due to a technical outage at NATS, affecting over 85,000 passengers and causing widespread air travel disruption in the UK.
• Heathrow and Gatwick airports faced major operational challenges recovering, with aircraft stranded across Europe and limited slots to return, prolonging delays and cancellations.
• NATS CEO Martin Rolfe promised a full investigation; the UK government, holding a significant stake, supports him despite repeated calls for his resignation by airlines like Ryanair.

LONDON - British Airways (BA) customers bore the brunt of a second day of severe air travel disruptions after a technical glitch at a key Britain node forced London Heathrow Airport and other hubs to cancel hundreds of flights.

BA said it scrapped about 550 flights on Sept 8 and Sept 9, affecting more than 85,000 passengers. The British flagship carrier runs a large long-haul schedule from its base at Heathrow, meaning it takes longer for operations to return to normal as aircraft are stuck farther afield.

On Sept 9 alone, BA cancelled about 200 flights. By comparison, budget specialist Ryanair Holdings Plc said it didn’t scrub any flights on Sept 9, while EasyJet Plc, Wizz Air Holdings Plc and Virgin Atlantic Airways cancelled only about 30 operations each. While Virgin also runs long-haul routes from Heathrow, its fleet is much smaller than that of BA. 

The spillover shows the complexity involved in restarting operations after the Sept 8 severe outage, with about 8,000 flights using the British air space on average each day. Heavy disruptions mean that aircraft and crew are out of position and extra flights need to be deployed to clear the backlog of stranded passengers.

In total, about 327 flights – representing about 5.6 per cent of the 5,869 scheduled – didn’t take place on Sept 9, according to Cirium data. On Sept 8, airports in Britain suffered more than 1,750 flight cancellations, Cirium said. BA said it was able to operate almost 80 per cent of its schedule across the entire network on Sept 9.

“The scale and challenge of dealing with the aftermath of an event like this is severe and complex,” the company said. “What this and previous disruption events highlight is the enormous impact customers suffer when one part of the aviation system fails.”

Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport, said that while operations are recovering, travellers should expect knock-on impacts. The airport, which is heavily constrained, said it has additional colleagues on hand to support across Heathrow’s terminals to rebuild the service.

“We’ve got a lot of aircraft that were dispersed across Europe,” Nigel Wicking, chief executive officer of Heathrow Airline Operators Committee, said during a transport committee meeting. “They’re going to find it very difficult to get back into the UK today because there aren’t that many ad hoc slots available at Heathrow for them to get back in.”

Gatwick Airport, the other main hub for London, said in a statement that “we still anticipate that it will take time for our operations to fully return to normal”.

The Sept 8 outage was related to a technical issue at NATS, a public-private company based in Swanwick, Hampshire, that oversees air traffic control in Britain. The government ruled out a cyber attack.

The service provider said in a statement that “this has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover”.

Outages have become a routine occurrence in Britain. Last summer, an unspecified radar-related issue shut down the country’s airspace. Another NATS glitch three years ago halted air traffic in the country and left planes, crews and passengers stranded.

Martin Rolfe, the CEO of NATS, was at the helm of the air-traffic control provider during each of these past glitches. Airlines including Ryanair and Wizz Air have repeatedly called for him to resign, with Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary on Sept 9 labelling him “an overpaid failure”.

“We will be doing a very thorough and full investigation,” Rolfe told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Not to take away any of the frustrations and disappointments from the people who haven’t been able to travel, but we do have one of the best systems and one of the best services in the world.”

Rolfe, who has been CEO for more than 11 years, was slated to meet with Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander on Sept 9 to discuss the IT failure. The British government holds a 49 per cent stake plus a blocking share in NATS, and has expressed confidence in Rolfe at the helm of the organization for now. 

The NATS Swanwick operations room manages the en-route airspace over England and Wales up to the Scottish border, as well as lower-altitude traffic to and from London’s airports, equal to about 2.5 million flights or 250 million passengers in the British airspace.

Heathrow suffered its worst disruption in decades early last year after a nearby fire cut power to the hub and brought travel to a standstill for hundreds of thousands of passengers. The airport in the south-west of London, handles roughly 1,400 flights and 200,000 passengers every day, and about 40 aircraft take off every hour at peak times on average.

The disruption adds to complex operations particularly for Middle East carriers like Emirates or Qatar Airways that have seen their services come under strain in recent months because of the Iran War. Heathrow is among the busiest hubs for carriers from the Persian Gulf, with Emirates alone operating about a dozen flights to London airports a day, many on its mammoth Airbus SE A380 aircraft. BLOOMBERG