August 30th 2023.
EasyJet has announced that it will be operating repatriation flights from Palma, Faro, Tenerife, Enfidha, and Rhodes this week, in an effort to help those affected by Monday's air traffic control failure.
The first of these repatriation flights will be taking off today, bringing passengers stranded in Palma, Majorca, and Faro in Portugal back to Gatwick. Further trips are scheduled to take people back from Enfidha in Tunisia and Tenerife tomorrow, and from the Greek island of Rhodes the following day.
This is a response to the worst failure of UK air traffic control in at least a decade, which caused hundreds of journeys to be delayed or cancelled on Monday. The problem was caused by the National Air Traffic Services receiving flight data which led to both its primary and backup systems to suspend automatic processing. This meant that all flight plans had to be processed manually, resulting in significant disruption across all flights heading in or out of the UK.
The chaos continued into Tuesday, with at least 281 flights across the UK's six busiest airports being cancelled. This included 75 at Gatwick, 74 at Heathrow, 63 at Manchester, 28 at Stansted, 23 at Luton, and 18 at Edinburgh.
Aviation analytics company Cirium said that 790 departures and 785 arrivals were cancelled across all UK airports on Monday. Nats Chief Executive Martin Rolfe has said that the issue relates to flight data they received, and that there are no indications that it was a cyber-attack.
EasyJet has also said that they are operating larger aircraft on key routes including Faro, Ibiza, Dalaman, and Tenerife in order to provide an additional 700 seats this week.
These repatriation flights will hopefully help those affected by the air traffic control failure get back home safely and as soon as possible.
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