July 31st - Another air-traffic control meltdown in the UK
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thousands of airline passengers are waking up where they did not intend to be after the temporary shutdown of UK airspace on Wednesday. What are passengers' rights?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. |
| 0:05.8 | It's Thursday the 31st of July and I had promised you an interview with the excellent TV historian, |
| 0:14.9 | Bettany Hughes about her new series. That's actually now going to be coming your way tomorrow |
| 0:20.5 | because I'm afraid instead I have to report on another air traffic control meltdown. |
| 0:27.9 | Thousands of airline passengers are waking up where they didn't intend to be after the latest temporary shutdown of UK airspace. This was a failure at Nats, the main air traffic |
| 0:43.0 | control provider during the middle of Wednesday afternoon. It led to dozens of diversions and |
| 0:50.1 | cancellations, particularly affecting, as always, London Heathrow and Gatwick |
| 0:55.1 | airports British Airways has cancelled a number of flights on Thursday morning to |
| 1:01.2 | Heathrow and EasyJet says it's been trying to rebook disruptive passengers on |
| 1:07.9 | alternative flights including other airlines so I just want to look at |
| 1:13.3 | what went wrong it's really quite difficult to say because Nats simply announced |
| 1:19.2 | that there was a technical issue at its Swanick air traffic control centre in |
| 1:24.4 | Hampshire that meant it was quote limiting the number of aircraft flying in the |
| 1:30.7 | London control area in order to ensure safety. What does actually mean? Well, across in Brussels, |
| 1:38.6 | Eurocontrol, which is the body that coordinates air traffic control right across Europe said London's airspace was |
| 1:47.1 | temporarily unavailable. This is the busiest airport airspace in the world and so it matters and |
| 1:55.8 | within minutes hundreds of flights heading for London had started to be delayed and diverted. |
| 2:03.5 | Although the fault was fixed within 40 minutes, we understand, the disruption is continuing. |
| 2:11.5 | And if you had flown in from Taipei or Bangkok, on Wednesday afternoon you were about an hour away from London. Well, |
| 2:19.5 | you would have been diverted to Frankfurt. You will still be there and anybody hoping to fly out |
| 2:26.6 | on the corresponding flight on China Airlines to Bangkok and Taipei. Well, that's now going, I think, |
| 2:33.9 | 20 hours late. Why is there such an impact |
... |
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