Air traffic control – latest: Airlines demand compensation reform as NATS outage sees 2,000 flights cancelled

Passengers hit by the air traffic control meltdown face being stranded abroad for up to a week, as it emerged that an incorrectly filed flight plan by a French airline may have triggered the outage.

Around 300,000 airline passengers have now been hit by flight cancellations since the hours-long failure of the Nats system on bank holiday Monday. The knock-on effect is set to last for several more days, as under-pressure airlines battle the backlog in a week where millions are already returning to the UK from their summer holidays.

Several sources say the issue may have been caused when a French airline filed a dodgy flight plan that made no digital sense. Instead of the error being rejected, it prompted a shutdown of the entire Nats system – raising questions over how one clerical error could cause such mayhem.

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At the height of holiday season travellers are still facing disruption following a failure of the main air-traffic control system across the UK.

As a result of the system failure on bank holiday Monday, almost 1,600 flights were cancelled – grounding around 250,000 holidaymakers.

On Tuesday, around 300 departures were cancelled as airlines struggled with aircraft and crew being out of position.

Wednesday has seen further disruption for holidaymakers, with more than 2,000 flights grounded in total.

Many stranded travellers have been left wondering whether they can claim compensation and what airlines are required to do to help them. Others are concerned about future holidays and how long before things will return to normal.

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The air traffic control glitch which caused thousands of flight cancellations and delays into and out of Britain has been fixed and will not be repeated, the head of Nats, the country’s air traffic control provider, said on Wednesday.

Thousands of Britons remain stranded abroad after 2,000 flights were cancelled on Monday and disruption to schedules persisted into Tuesday. The peak holiday period means those affected are not being offered alternative flights for days.

Martin Rolfe, the CEO of Nats said the technical problem was caused by a flight plan which was “not sufficiently standard”. He said the issue had been fixed.

“We’ve worked incredibly hard since we restored the service back on Monday to make sure that this type of event can’t happen again,” he told the BBC.

Ryanair criticised Nats on Tuesday for not having a back-up system. With crews and planes in the wrong places, airlines are now scrambling to get passengers home, a process with which Nats is involved.

EasyJet said it was adding five extra flights from holiday hotspots in Portugal and Spain later this week to fly people home.

The Independent’s Travel Correspondent Simon Calder has outlined how stranded Brits can get money back from airlines following the air traffic control failure.

Simon has clarified the difference between compensation and reimbursements.

He said: “If your flight is cancelled, the airline has a strict obligation to deliver a duty of care.

“This includes getting you back as soon as possible, getting you a hotel room, getting your meals. All of that the airline has to do and if they’re not booking a hotel for you, then you keep the receipts and claim it back.

“But, nobody is going to get cash compensation because it’s clearly not the airline’s fault.”

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A sales executive who estimated he and his wife were “about £2,200 out of pocket” after their flight from Crete was cancelled due to an air traffic control glitch are hopeful about receiving compensation after initially being denied by easyJet.

Tom Perry, 31, told the PA news agency on Tuesday that their easyJet flights for the night before from Heraklion airport to Luton had been cancelled due to the glitch.

The couple, based in Cornwall, were offered new easyJet flights home for the following Monday, free of charge, which they accepted as “that was the only [direct flights] available” at the time, Mr Perry said.

Mr Perry said: “Then, about an hour later, I looked online and found one that goes from Crete airport this coming Friday with Jet2, so we booked with them to go back to Bristol.”

The couple paid £1,172 for the Friday flights and requested a refund for the Monday return flights the couple were no longer availing of, but easyJet had declined.

The flight cancellation forced the couple to pay for an extended stay at their accommodation in Sissi for around £250, a parking space for additional days at Luton airport for around £120, and an extended stay for their dog at a kennel.

Mr Perry’s wife, Ella, 27, is an NHS nurse who could “lose pay or annual leave”, he said.

He said he “spent six hours on live chats and calls, albeit probably 4.5 hours was trying to get through” and easyJet were “refusing to refund”.

On Wednesday morning, easyJet provided the couple with the opportunity to apply for compensation for the expenses they have accumulated due to the flight disruption.

Mr Perry told the PA news agency: “Obviously I’m not going to get my hopes up too much until it comes through but yeah, obviously, it does make a difference.

“The lady on the phone today has been really, really helpful, but what I can’t quite understand is why we weren’t offered this option yesterday.”

The airport experience is rarely a pleasant one at the best of times, but as the summer holidays draw to a close this year, it has become even more fraught with stress and frustration.

Air traffic control (ATC) issues led to the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights across 28, 29 and 30 August, with hundreds of thousands of travellers’ plans impacted.

There is a simple way to sidestep the chaos, though: avoid the airport entirely. An increasing number of travel companies are offering flight-free trips, whether by rail or ferry, removing the possibility that ATC failures can play havoc with your highly anticipated holiday itinerary.

Helen Coffey has more:

Britain’s largest budget airline is sending “rescue flights” for passengers stranded abroad by air traffic control chaos.

As hundreds of flights were cancelled on Tuesday, easyJet confirmed it would operate five repatriation flights to London Gatwick over the coming days.

The first two rescue flights operated from Palma and Faro yesterday, and there will be flights from Tenerife and Enfidha today (31 August) and Rhodes on 1 September.

The UK’s air traffic control system failed in response to a faulty flight plan, the boss of Nats has told The Independent.

Martin Rolfe, chief executive of the air traffic control service, revealed for the first time that the fault was initially identified at 8.30am on Monday – almost three hours before the automatic system went offline, leaving controllers to handle aircraft manually.

The system is designed for caution when confronted with anomalous data. Rather than risk air traffic controllers being presented with false information, the system went into its back-up mode – which stores up to four hours of data.

Read Simon Calder’s exclusive report.

A pregnant woman who travelled to Greece to celebrate her first wedding anniversary is among thousands of passengers left stranded abroad, as UK air travel continues to reel from a major air traffic control meltdown.

Around 200,000 people saw their flights cancelled on Monday after a technical fault with National Air Traffic Services systems led to 1,500 planes being grounded and many thousands more delayed.

Lucy Chang, who is six months pregnant, and her husband Iain Hawthorn initially faced a 10-day wait to return from the Greek island of Rhodes, where they had been celebrating their first anniversary, after their flight to Gatwick on Monday was cancelled.

Willie Walsh, former British Airways boss, said he finds it “staggering” that the UK‘s air traffic control system was caused to “collapse” by a piece of incorrect data.

Mr Walsh, director-general of global airline body the International Air Transport Association (Iata), told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I find it staggering, I really do.

“This system should be designed to reject data that’s incorrect, not to collapse the system.

“If that is true, it demonstrates a considerable weakness that must have been there for some time and I’m amazed if that is the cause of this.

“Clearly we’ll wait for the full evaluation of the problem but that explanation doesn’t stand up from what I know of the system.”