Furious passengers slam ‘absolute carnage’ as 1,000 flights cancelled across the UK

Passengers across the UK have complained of “absolute carnage” after over 1,000 flights were grounded, according to monitoring service Flightradar.

Tens of thousands of passengers have had their travel plans cancelled at the last minute with airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and across the country from Jersey to Aberdeen all affected. Flightradar calculated that 4 percent of total UK air traffic has been affected.

The chaos has been blamed on “technical issues” with the National Air Traffic Services earlier announcing the problem had been resolved. However, after three hours, air traffic officials admitted the knock-on effect of the system disruption would cause flight problems into Wednesday.

Many of those affected were left spitting in anger – not only by the disruption itself – but also by the response on the part of airports and airlines who were accused of poor communication and decision-making.

Taking to social media platform X, Lee Rhodes posted an image of crowds of people all milling around what looked like an airport check-in lounge.

He posted the caption: “Absolute carnage at Heathrow T5, accept technical fault beyond British Airways control but the lack of comms and information is shocking.”

X-user add more Chillies said, “As usual Heathrow totally unprepared for anything.”

British Airways said in a statement, "We were forced to cancel or divert more than 100 flights on Tuesday afternoon.

"We're doing everything we can to keep our customers updated and make arrangements for them to continue their journeys.

"We ask customers whose flights have been cancelled not to travel to the airport and to bear with us if they're trying to get in touch, as our call centres are incredibly busy at the moment."

However, UK passengers were not the only ones affected, with thousands of arrivals also impacted the knock-on affect has hit international travellers as well.

In response, Air India issued the following statement on X, “Hi, we understand that disruptions are never ideal. The flight has been diverted due to air traffic control (ATC) system failure at Heathrow airport. We have alerted our airport team to provide the real time assistance to the passengers. Hope for your kind understanding and patience.