The chaos at British airports could continue for several days and create an extreme situation in full “return operation” after the August holidays, as the Secretary of Transport Mark Harper acknowledged to the BBC, who ruled out that the fall of the air control systems was due to a cyberattack.
More of 500 flights (271 arrivals and 232 departures) were suspended on Monday due to the technical failure that forced the “manual processing” of air control and affected more than 6,000 flights. Hundreds of Britons stayed overnight in the most affected airports, from Heathrow to Edinburgh, waiting for news about the departure of their flights.
He National Air Traffic Services (Nats) reported on Monday that the problem had been “identified and solved”, but the delays continued on Tuesday and “it will take days to return to normality”, as predicted by the Secretary of Transport.
“I want to apologize for the disruption caused,” said Mark Harper. “Our priority was to guarantee the safety of the flights, and for this reason we had to reduce capacity by resorting to the manual air control system. It was imperative to cancel some flights. Airlines have the responsibility to facilitate the return of passengers or pay for their room and board.”
“We are investigating what happened, but it is clear that it was not a cyberattack,” added Harper, who rejected criticism against the obsolete transport infrastructure: “Air traffic systems work perfectly 99.9% of the time and allow that millions of passengers travel to the UK without incident”.