Flight chaos made worse by engineer delay, report finds

Airports, restaurants and hotels, and most importantly alternative flights, quickly became full. While airlines made “huge efforts” to be there for customers in many cases, there were incidents where “incomplete or incorrect information was given about passenger rights”, food vouchers were not accepted or not enough hotel accommodation was offered. Tim Alderslade, the chief executive of Airlines UK said the interim report “contains damning evidence that NATS’ basic resilience planning and procedures were wholly inadequate and fell well below the standard that should be expected for national infrastructure of this importance”. He added further investigation would lead to recommendations in the final report “so that this kind of catastrophic failure is not allowed to happen again”.