Thousands of passengers were affected by the glitch at the National Air Traffic Services' (Nats) con

Thousands of passengers were affected by the glitch at the National Air Traffic Services' (Nats) control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire – which deals with air traffic luxury car rental atlanta in the south of England. A fifth of all flights were cancelled at Heathrow , Stansted and Gatwick airports while others faced delays of up to two hours.
"The problem that arose this morning with the ground communications system in the area control operations room at Nats Swanwick has now been resolved and operations are returning to normal," a Nats spokesman said shortly after 7.30pm.
The spokesman said Nats regretted the disruption caused but insisted that passenger safety had not been compromised. He said problems luxury car rental atlanta arose during a switch from night to daytime operations, when communication systems failed to adjust.
"To be clear, this is a very complex and sophisticated system with more than a million lines of software. This is not simply internal telephones, it is the system that controllers luxury car rental atlanta use to speak to other [air traffic control] agencies both in the UK and Europe and is the biggest system of its kind in Europe.
"This has been a major challenge for our engineering team and for the manufacturer, who has worked closely with us to ensure this complex problem was resolved as quickly as possible while maintaining a safe service."
Passengers at Heathrow airport, Europe's busiest, suffered delays of more than an hour on many morning departures, and several dozen short-haul flights to destinations including Nice, Milan and Istanbul were cancelled.
A Stansted airport spokesman said all of its departing flights had been subject to delays of between 30 minutes and two hours, while Gatwick airport said 20% of its departures luxury car rental atlanta had been delayed, with passengers luxury car rental atlanta warned they could have to wait "a couple of hours".
luxury car rental atlanta On its website, Ryanair apologised for any inconvenience: "Ryanair has been advised of an equipment failure within UK air traffic control which will cause significant flight delays and possible cancellations."
"There are contingency plans in place whenever this happens," he said. "Many of the long-haul flights, coming from China, India, luxury car rental atlanta the US and so on, passengers sitting on those planes may find themselves diverted to continental airports.
"And also, it's embarrassing, isn't it? When you look around a lot of people on my plane are not British, they are flying British Airways, they are probably trying to get back to Spain and they will inevitably be thinking this is something that could have possibly been prevented.
"I have never heard of an example where every single plane is grounded – it's quite eerie when I look out of the window to see the [runway] in Gatwick, normally so busy, and also the sky above Gatwick luxury car rental atlanta which is normally busy – completely static, there's nothing moving."