Tens of thousands more airline passengers suffered flight cancellations on Tuesday due to the knock-on impact of an air traffic control (ATC) fault.
For passengers coming to and from Ireland, 20 flights out of Dublin Airport have been cancelled on Tuesday, following on from 115 cancelled flights on Monday. Twenty-two flights to and from Cork Airport were also axed.
Meanwhile, Shannon Airport's website shows six inbound flights from Gatwick, Heathrow, Edinburgh and Newcastle were cancelled, in addition to four outbound flights to Heathrow, Edinburgh and Newcastle.
The operator of Cork and Dublin Airport, daa, deployed additional resources on Tuesday to deal with the impact of the cancellations and advised passengers that the airports may be busier than usual, urging them to check the status of their flight before heading to the airport.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary added the airline expects to cancel around 70 flights across Europe on Tuesday due to the issue.
Britain's transport secretary Mark Harper said it was the worst incident of its kind in “nearly a decade” and announced an “independent review” will be carried out.
The issue started on Monday, when more than a quarter of flights at UK airports were cancelled.
ATC provider National Air Traffic Services (Nats) suffered what it described as a “technical issue” preventing it from automatically processing flight plans.
This resulted in flights to and from UK airports being restricted while the plans were checked manually.
Nats said at 3.15pm on Monday the problem was resolved, but disruption continued into Tuesday as many aircraft and crews were out of position.
Analysis of flight data websites by the PA news agency shows at least 281 flights – including departures and arrivals – were cancelled on Tuesday at the UK’s six busiest airports.
This consisted of 75 at Gatwick, 74 at Heathrow, 63 at Manchester, 28 at Stansted, 23 at Luton and 18 at Edinburgh.
Many other flights were significantly delayed.
British prime minister Rishi Sunak told broadcasters: “I know people will be enormously frustrated by the disruption that’s impacting them.
“Thankfully things like this are rare and the issue itself was fixed in a matter of hours, but the disruption obviously is continuing and will last for a little while longer.
“The Transport Secretary is in constant dialogue with all the industry participants, he will be talking to airlines specifically later today and making sure that they support passengers to get home as quickly as possible.”
Mr Harper told GB News: “This was a technical fault. We do not think this was a cybersecurity incident.
“And what will happen now with an incident of this magnitude is there will be an independent review.
“The Civil Aviation Authority will be putting together a report in the coming days, which obviously I will take a look at to see whether there are lessons to learn for the future, to see whether we can reduce the impact of this again.
“It’s nearly a decade since there was a significant issue like this.
“We want to make sure it doesn’t happen again, because of all the disruption that’s been caused to passengers across the country.”
An unprecedented ATC systems failure in December 2014 led to widespread disruption at airports.
In relation to the latest incident, Rob Bishton, interim chief executive at regulator the Civil Aviation Authority, said: “As part of our regulatory oversight of its activities, we continue to engage with Nats, and once its investigation is fully complete an incident report will be provided to the UK Civil Aviation Authority.
“The report’s outcomes will then be shared with the Secretary of State for Transport.”
Aviation analytics company Cirium said 790 departures and 785 arrivals were cancelled across all UK airports on Monday.
That was equivalent to around 27 per cent of planned flights and means around a quarter of a million people were affected.
A message from our Operations Director about today’s disruption. pic.twitter.com/C4LWX7VyM8
— NATS (@NATS) August 28, 2023
Aviation consultant John Strickland said providing ATC for flights is “complicated”.
He went on: “Systems are meant to be robust. They are pressure tested and that does give a very high level of reliability.
“But as we’ve seen in other parts of the industry, and undoubtedly in other industries too like the banking sector, there is a vulnerability in which relying on IT systems presents.”
Passengers were urged by airlines to check before they leave for the airport as their flight times may have changed.
