Phone glitch causes UK flight delays

7 December 2013
Last updated at 13:12 ET

Some airlines are cancelling short-haul flights but trying to only delay long-haul services

A telephone glitch that caused hundreds of flights to be delayed will not be fixed before 1800 GMT, air traffic controllers have said.

Thousands of passengers faced cancellations and long waits after the National Air Traffic Service (Nats) internal phone system broke down.

Disruption of Sunday’s flights is “inevitable”, Nats said, even if the problem is rectified later.

Affected airports include Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Cardiff and Glasgow.

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“Start Quote

People are really aggravated, children are crying”

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Alena Kontza
Passenger

A passenger who said he had been waiting five hours at London’s Gatwick airport said people were “crying, distraught and angry”.

“One passenger has missed their sister’s wedding,” Tom Flatman, from Brighton, told the BBC.

‘Not good enough’

By midday, air traffic controllers had dealt with 2,800 flights rather than the usual 3,500 on a normal Saturday.

Ryanair has 100 flights affected to and from the south of England, with 10 flights cancelled. It called on the Civil Aviation Authority to act.

“While we acknowledge problems can occur, where is the contingency? It’s simply not good enough and the CAA needs to act now,” it said in a statement.

Heathrow had cancelled 60 flights by 09:45 GMT, with these split between arrivals and departures.

Meanwhile:

• British Airways said the technical problems had already led to flight cancellations and warned that they “will cause delays to some flights”

• EasyJet said although the majority of its morning flights had departed, “severe delays” and possible cancellations could be expected later

Nats said the problem at its Swanwick centre, in Hampshire, arose in the early hours of Saturday morning when the night-time operation failed to properly switch over to the daytime system.

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Analysis

Something as simple as a broken internal telephone system has brought delays and cancellations for thousands of travellers today.

The controllers at the air traffic control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire, use it to swap important data about aircraft, it’s vital to help them perform their job even though many of them are sitting in the same room.

That system failed to work this morning as they tried to switch from the quieter, night time mode, to the busier daytime mode.

It meant they couldn’t open all the work stations needed to cope with a normal Saturday, so they’ve been running a reduced service ever since.

Instead of 3,500 flights, they’ve only be able to process 2,800 or so.

Nats tell me they’ve never had this problem before, and that it’s totally different to a computer glitch that caused some delays last summer.

Even so airline Ryanair isn’t happy at having to cancel and disrupt so many flights. In a statement it acknowledges that problems occur, but asks the question “where is the contingency?”

It’s the airlines that normally pick up the bill for compensation.

“At night we manage quite big sectors of airspace because the traffic demand is low,” Nats operations manager Juliet Kennedy said.

“During the day, as demand increases, we need to split the airspace into smaller sectors – last night we were unable to open new positions.

“It was a problem with the internal telephone system.”

She said she expected it to be fixed between 1800 and 1830 GMT but that how long disruption to flight schedules would continue depended on the individual airlines.

She added that there had been no impact safety.

The BBC’s transport correspondent Richard Westcott said it was a totally different issue to a software problem that hit the control centre in summer.

Ms Kennedy added: “We want to apologise to people. We are very aware of how much inconvenience this has caused people.”

‘Shambolic’

Belfast, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Southampton, Luton, London City, Newcastle, Exeter and Bournemouth are among other airports that have reported delays, asking passengers to check with their airlines.

Stansted Airport said flights were subject to delays, while Gatwick said 20% of its departures had been delayed, with passengers being warned they may have to wait for “a couple of hours”.

At Stansted, Alena Kontza was stuck on a Ryanair plane that had been delayed for three hours. She told the BBC passengers had been given “absolutely no information” and “it’s been nothing less than shambolic”.

“People are really aggravated, children are crying, people want to leave, people want to change to different planes, it’s an absolute nightmare,” she said.

And in Norwich, one mother said she was worried she would have to cancel a planned Christmas trip to Lapland tomorrow morning.

“It’s the second time we are trying to do this trip,” Lisa Smith said. “We were grounded by snow two years ago.

“My son will be devastated. How do you tell a child twice they are not going to Lapland?”

National Air Traffic Systems: “We are not able to meet the demands”

Independent aviation analyst Chris Yates said it was going to be a “day of frustrations”.

He said that passengers due to arrive at UK airports from overseas could find themselves diverted elsewhere.

“But it’s going to be a long wait for them. When the system kicks back in and starts working, there will be a backlog of flights.

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Phone glitch causes UK flight delays