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Bank holiday ATC meltdown impacted more than 700,000 passengers – CAA

Government
James Chapple
14 March 2024

More than 700,000 passengers were impacted by last year’s August bank holiday air traffic control meltdown, it has been revealed, which grounded UK air traffic for several hours.

Air Traffic Control iStock-147708625 (Credit: iStock)

Airlines and airports face issues with the outage at Swanwick (Credit: iStock)

The CAA said on Thursday (14 March) it estimated that around 300,000 of these passengers suffered cancellations, 95,000 delays of at least three hours, and 300,000 shorter delays when the systems went down on Monday 28 August last year.


Thursday’s interim report from the independent review panel investigating the outage said the UK’s air traffic control provider Nats had "acted to address a number of findings arising from its own internal investigation", adding the panel had made "good progress" with respect to understanding the cause of the failure.