‘Technical issues' sees almost all flights across the UK grounded
London Heathrow, Europe's busiest airport and the home base for both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, was put out of action for at least an hour.
One major airline has said the incident was 'shambolic' and could leave thousands of passengers stranded.
The outage occurred at around 4pm UK time (1am Wednesday AEST).
It wasn't just Heathrow. The UK's second busiest airport, London Gatwick, was also affected as were air hubs in Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh and London's Luton, City and Stansted airports among others.
Eye opening images from flight tracking websites showed no flights at all leaving from Heathrow and barely any planes in the skies over southern England, one of the world's biggest air traffic corridors.
The outage was centred on Britain's National Air Traffic Services (NATS) which coordinates the UK's skies.
The organisation said there were 'technical issues' at its Swanwick air traffic control centre, outside Southampton in England's south.
Swanwick handles 5500 flights a day coming into London or flying over England and Wales.
'We are limiting the number of aircraft flying in the London control area in order to ensure safety, which is always our first priority,' NATS said in a statement confirming the disruption.
'Our engineers are working hard to resolve the problem as quickly as possible and we are working closely with airlines to help minimise disruption.'
Around an hour later, NATS said it had restored its systems which were now 'fully operational'.
'We are working with affected airlines and airports to clear the backlog safely.'
Clearing that backlog is not easy in such a congested area.
British Airways said in a statement that it had been restricted to two thirds of its usual departures and arrivals until mid-evening on Wednesday.
Travel journalist Simon Calder told BBC Radio Scotland that 'so much unravels as a result of this that we are talking hundreds of thousands of people will be affected'.
'It's an unbelievable meltdown'.
Call for air traffic control head to resign
NATS has had similar incidents in 2023 and 2014, reported The Guardian, one of which was caused by a 'single piece of data in a flight plan that was wrongly inputted to its system by an unnamed airline'.
While there were backup systems, the erroneous data caused that system to also be suspended for safety reasons.
As you can imagine, airlines are not happy about the outage, especially as it has occurred just two years after the last incident.
Low cost airline Ryanair, whose major London hub Stansted was heavily affected, has already called for NATS CEO Martin Rolfe to go.
'It is outrageous that passengers are once again being hit with delays and disruption due to Martin Rolfe's continued mismanagement of NATS,' chief operating officer Neal McMahon said in a statement after Wednesday's incident.
'Yet another ATC system failure has resulted in the closure of UK airspace meaning thousands of passengers' travel plans have been disrupted.
'It is clear that no lessons have been learnt since the 2023 NATS system outage, and passengers continue to suffer as a result of Martin Rolfe's incompetence.'
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