Flying into Europe’s largest airport is a crap shoot this week.
More than 2,000 flights were cancelled in Britain after the country’s air traffic control service, NATS, said there was a “technical problem” on Tuesday afternoon.
London Heathrow AirportEurope’s busiest in terms of passenger numbers and one of the world’s most important transit hubs was hardest hit.
The skies above London were eerily empty as hundreds of thousands of passengers across the country were stuck waiting on the tarmac or in chaotic airport terminals.
Tuesday’s pandemonium is causing even more disruption as many planes and flight crews are left behind in unexpected cities.
British respiratory system said Wednesday morning that staff worked through the night to create a new flight schedule, but 190 flights still had to be canceled.
According to data from aviation analytics company Cirium, 1,746 flights to and from Britain were canceled or did not depart on Tuesday. That is approximately 30% of the daily program.
As of Wednesday afternoon, another 291 flights had been canceled, representing 5% of the flight schedule, per Cirium. A typical cancellation rate is between 1% and 2%.
Nearly half of scheduled flights to Heathrow were canceled on Tuesday, according to Cirium data. A total of more than 700 flights to and from Heathrow had been canceled on Wednesday afternoon.
Heathrow has one of the most international flight schedules of any airport in the world, with passengers able to fly to more than 200 cities in more than 80 countries this month. The impact of cancellations is therefore global in nature.
In addition to cancellations, Business Insider analyzed Flightradar24 data showing that 70 flights bound for Heathrow were diverted elsewhere on Tuesday.
Eleven of these ended up at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, while six went to Edinburgh and Frankfurt.
Not shown on this map is Air Canada Flight 2080, from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Data from Flightradar24 showed the Boeing 737 Max was halfway across the Atlantic Ocean before making a U-turn and diverting to Newfoundland.
Six flights operated by a double-decker Airbus A380 – the largest passenger plane in the world – were among the diversions. Half were operated by Emirates, the Dubai-based airline, which landed in Birmingham, Munich and Dusseldorf, rather than London.
Passengers on Singapore Airlines Flight 308 may have had their most confusing ordeal.
The A380 had flown for 13 hours when it was forced to circle over London and turn back. At first it headed east towards Cologne, Germany, but changed direction again and was eventually diverted to Paris.
This week’s issues are the latest in a series of recent issues with NATS that have caused travel chaos in Great Britain.
In August 2023, 700,000 travelers were affected after a software bug disabled NATS’ automatic flight planning system. The event is estimated to have cost airlines, airports, insurers, passengers and others up to £100 million or $135 million, according to Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority.
After a wave of flight delays a year later, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary called on the NATS boss to resign. O’Leary said the incident was “the latest in a long line of nonsense”.
Ryanair executives renewed O’Leary’s call after this week’s disruption.
Neal McMahon, Ryanair’s Chief Operating Officer, said: “How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before they are overpaid, failing NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe, accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns?”
In statements to X, NATS said it was “truly sorry”.
“We know this is extremely frustrating and we apologize unreservedly,” it added.
Late Tuesday, NATS said it was helping airlines and airports recover.
“This has been a very complex recovery and has caused problems for the entire aviation network, the recovery from which will take some time.”
Rolfe was summoned to a meeting with Britain’s transport secretary on Wednesday, The Guardian reported.
