Air-traffic control failure: what will be different next time?

Simon Calder, also known as The Man Who Pays His Way, has been writing about travel for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly opinion column, he explores a key travel issue – and what it means for you.

A sudden flight cancellation is an odd experience.

One moment you are preparing to fly hundreds or thousands of miles: perhaps to a fresh and exciting destination, or simply keen to get home because of family or work commitments. Emotionally, you are almost there, with just a few hours of eating, napping or looking out of the window in idle contemplation ahead of your arrival.

The next moment – after that fateful announcement that the plane is going nowhere – you realise that you will not now be ticking off the distance at nine miles per minute. You have no idea how the next few hours, or days, will turn out. And, like it or not, you are in competition with every other passenger on your flight for available hotel rooms and replacement flights.

At Luton airport last Tuesday evening, five planes – all boarded and ready to go – were cancelled before take-off due to a serious fire in a car park a couple of hundred metres away from the terminal. Most of the many hundreds of passengers discovered that they would be obliged to try to sleep on the floor of the airport terminal.

Next morning, they learnt Luton would remain closed for most of the day and they must begin the long and complicated business of trying to reschedule their trips.

Jack, who was trying to fly home to Dublin, told me of his experience asking at a series of local hotels for a room. “We’ve been sold out for hours,” was the refrain.

“So I just came back here and I’ve been trying to sleep on the cold floor since,” Jack said. When we talked, he was waiting for the airline desk to open to try to figure out his options.

“It seems like you’re in sort of some sort of weird limbo,” he told me. “I hope it’s swifter than I’m thinking it might be.”

Now imagine that experience shared by a quarter of a million people on a single day. That is what happened on bank holiday Monday, 28 August 2023, when the main UK air-traffic control computer system, and its back-up, failed for several hours.

Disruption ripples very quickly through aviation, especially at busy airports. London Heathrow and Gatwick, the two biggest UK airports, are particularly susceptible. Cancellations began immediately.

By the time engineers working for the air-navigation provider, Nats, solved the problem, the outage had led to 1,600 cancelled flights – with around 400 more to follow over the next couple of days, due to planes and pilots being stranded out of position by the air-traffic control shutdown.

The episode is the subject of a session of the transport select committee this coming Wednesday, 18 October. Martin Rolfe, the chief executive of Nats, will be grilled by MPs about what went wrong and, crucially, whether he can guarantee it won’t happen again.

The session “will also examine how airlines were affected, and how effectively they communicated with and made arrangements for their passengers”. A brace of airline bosses – Michael O’Leary of Ryanair and Jonathan Hinkles of Loganair – will face questions, along with Sophie Dekkers, chief commercial officer for easyJet, Britain’s biggest budget airline.

Probably like you, I am keen to learn more about the causes of the meltdown and its effect on the airlines. But I am even more interested in the carriers’ communication with, and care of, passengers.

The first casualty of aviation chaos is communication. I cut the airlines some slack on this: if the incredibly complex three-dimensional chess game that keeps us moving through the skies suddenly gets disrupted, it inevitably takes time for airline duty offices and flight crew to work out what to do with each of hundreds of flights.

On the day, most of those decisions were “cancel”. Immediately that happens, European air passengers’ rights rules kick in, requiring the airline to provide:

That prospect is tricky enough when a single flight “goes tech”. When planes are being grounded in their hundreds, it is terrifying. By all accounts staff performed some miracles in finding hotels for stranded planeloads during one of the busiest weeks of the summer.

Too often, though, passengers were left to fend for themselves. Experienced travellers might well be comfortable enough using a smartphone and a credit card to find accommodation and a fresh flight.

But infrequent passengers, especially those who have mobility issues or who don’t possess a robust credit card, need extra care.

It would help if airlines were transparent about their obligations.

I have lost count of the number of friends, colleagues and readers who said they had been told “no flights until Friday” by their airline – which unaccountably failed to spell out that it was responsible for paying for a flight on a different airline.

In a letter sent to airlines ahead of the peak summer season in 2023, the Civil Aviation Authority said: “We consider that professional diligence requires airlines to have in place reasonably appropriate organisation and support staff to source replacement flights and complete the booking if consumers wish to take up this offer.

“Likewise, airlines should organise appropriate care, including overnight accommodation, for those who need it.”

Airlines now need to be challenged about whether they took the slightest bit of notice of this instruction – and how they intend to comply the next time the aviation system seizes up.

Fortunately, I can do just that on Wednesday, because the transport select committee has kindly invited me to be the warm-up act before the proper aviation people are questioned. I shall let you know what happens.