More than 2,000 flights cancelled as air traffic boss makes promise over future outages – latest
More than 2,000 flights have been cancelled in the last three days, following an hours-long air control system failure that sent flight schedules into meltdown and left thousands of travellers stranded.
The update comes as the UK’s air traffic control boss, Mark Rolfe said the glitch – caused by “dodgy” flight data – has been fixed and will not occur in the future.
In an exclusive interview with The Independent’s travel correspondent Simon Calder, Mr Rolfe also explained how National Air Traffic Services (Nats) engineers raced against time to bring the system back online after “dodgy” flight data caused a serious outage.
Mr Rolfe said the fault was first identified at 8.30am, three hours before the automatic system went offline.
“We were working on a timeline of restoring the system before 12:30pm,” he added. What followed after was back-and-forth communication with airlines, the Department for Transport, the Civil Aviation Authority – and the realisation that “there was potential for a significant problem”.
Have you been affected by delays? If so email maanya.sachdeva@independent.co.uk
