Air traffic control failure in the United Kingdom: the bill promises to be steep

A giant air traffic control blackout disrupting the return to the UK of thousands of travelers after a long bank holiday weekend will cost airlines tens of millions of pounds, an industry official said on Wednesday. "Across the sector, we will have nearly £100 million (€116 million) in additional costs that airlines will have faced," the chief executive of the International Air Transport Association told the BBC on Wednesday. air transport (Iata), Willie Walsh.

According to this former boss of British Airways and its parent company IAG, the companies will in particular have to bear the costs linked to the costs of assistance to passengers and the disruption of crew and aircraft schedules. The failure of the British air traffic control system on Monday forced airline agents to manually enter flight plans, leading to numerous delays and cancellations. NATS, the British air traffic control authority, admitted to AFP on Tuesday that several days would be needed to return to normal and bring all travelers home.

More than 1,500 flights departing from or arriving in the United Kingdom, more than a quarter of the total, had to be canceled on Monday, and another 345 on Tuesday, according to the specialized company Cirium. Tens of thousands, even up to several hundred thousand people could have seen their flights canceled on Monday, during this breakdown described by British Transport Minister Mark Harper as the largest in nearly a decade. The British company Easyjet announced on Wednesday that it would charter five flights by the end of the week to bring tourists still stranded in Spain, Portugal, Tunisia or Greece back to the United Kingdom, specifying that its operations have now returned to the normal.

The outage was caused by "unusual data" fed into the system, NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe said on Wednesday, without confirming speculation in the British press that it was a problem on a flight filed by a French airline. Mark Harper said Tuesday that it was "not a cyberattack" and announced an administrative investigation into the incident.