Flights to and from Britain will be disrupted for days, the British government said on Tuesday, after a technical glitch with the country’s air traffic control system left thousands of passengers stranded abroad or facing serious delays.
About 280 flights were canceled on Tuesday, about 5 percent of the total number due to depart or arrive for Britain, according to Cirium, an aviation analysis company, compounding travel problems for British holidaymakers after more than a thousand flights were canceled the day before.
The trouble came at a particularly busy time for travelers in Britain, many of whom were returning from summer holidays or long weekends because Monday was a public holiday in the country.
“The timing was not helpful to the people at all,” Mark Harper, the minister responsible for transport policy, told the BBC on Tuesday morning. “It has disrupted thousands of people. Many flights were canceled yesterday due to the need to keep the system running safely, and it will take several days for everyone to get back to where they should be.
He added that the government’s technical experts had concluded that the episode was not a cyber-attack.
Britain’s National Air Traffic Service, which manages air traffic control, said Monday a malfunction in the automatic system that processes aircraft routes meant flight plans had to be entered manually for hours.
When air traffic control problems arise, the priority is to safely land planes already in the air, experts say, forcing hundreds of flights to be temporarily grounded or canceled. They added that delays continued on Tuesday in part because aircraft and crews were out of place.
Air traffic services director of operations Juliet Kennedy apologized in a video Monday night, adding that “it will take some time for flights to return to normal.” She said the company would thoroughly investigate what caused the outage.
Passengers are urged to check the status of their flight with their airline before traveling to the airport.
