UK air traffic control hit by network-wide failure

It's also the busiest day of the year for UK Aviation. Putin up to his old tricks again!?

EI-NSC was on the DUB-LHR-NOC-LHR-DUB rotation today, but due to the ATC issues it seems it went NOC-DUB instead of attempting to go back to LHR.

My Aer Lingus flight got cancelled out of Heathrow back to Cork today and earliest flight I got offered was Wednesday (waitlisted for tomorrow and that was only after I pushed that I had Concierge status).

Managed to get a Ryanair flight out of Gatwick then by looking myself

Ya, was tempted to just go to Heathrow and hope but then saw one from Gatwick so took a shot on that

Imagine all the airlines going to claim extraordinary circumstances and not pay out too here

The way especially Aer Lingus dealt with this is really bad.

An hour ago, or so BA started selling seats to both Cork and Dublin across multiple flights tomorrow while people still did not get their canceled flights rescheduled and Aer Lingus Website said, "no flights".

Now Aer Lingus website shows also open flights but several people I know have problems to change their booking online and are hanging in the phone queue.

I called again, got a confused agent who wanted to charge me extra for making the change and when I told her I see that they are selling seats for less than I originally paid (I kid you not) she after multiple times on hold managed to get me on the first flight tomorrow to Cork.

She was stressed and you could hear agents in the background having a bad time, I remained calm and helped her through finding the right flights and while it took a while she managed to get it sorted but I guess I was lucky that I checked the webpage and did know what I wanted.

100% agree on right to care etc but just don’t think EU261 will cover this.

if they are putting pax on later flights when earlier options exist, that’s not on.

Aer Lingus will claim "extraordinary circumstance" and hence not be required to pay any compensation.

BUT if the delay is over 2 hours, they still need to offer assistance under UK law and here is where Aer Lingus clearly failed (at least in my case).

The Civil Aviation Authority is clear in this, and they define it as

• two free phone calls, faxes or emails (often by refunding the cost of your calls)

• free meals and refreshments appropriate to the delay (often in voucher form)

• free hotel accommodation and hotel transfers if an overnight stay is required.

And giving how Aer Lingus was not able to provide help at the airport and the contact center in some cases only answered calls way after 2100 it's clear that they did not offer assistance so I did it myself and will provide reasonable receipts.

Also giving how most of the hotels in LHR shot up to over 500£ this is going to be fun to claim. And that for hotels usually going for 99£.

Issues happen but the way Aer Lingus handled this is bad, not to mention trying to charge people for rebooking canceled flights and suddenly selling tickets for cheaper prices than the day before while telling people the earliest is Wednesday.

The 0920 LHR to ORK had an Aerspace seat for 165£ available, which was cheaper than several other fares during the whole day! Some of the fares during the day were down to as low as 63£ for the late evening flight.

They changed my flight to a flight where the fare for the same booking class is 50% of what I paid and wanted to have a change fee!

It is going to be interesting to see what Aer Lingus is going to do about this when it comes to refunds and complaints about how the rebooking worked.

I feel for the call center people, they clearly had a bad day but why management was not present in LHR with information is unbelievable.

Not much mention of a similar system outage impacting the Rome ATC area of Italy, same day, flight planning but later in the afternoon.

Yup, like I'm Concierge so one of the benefits of that is a guaranteed seat on a full flight and all they could was waitlist me for this morning. Them actually having space on it then just takes the piss

I pretty much asked can they put me in any flight back to Ireland from London, and best they could do was waitlist me for a flight that turns out had empty seats. Id have gone to any airport so I'd call bs on both those concierge seats being taken on any flight they had going up until Wednesday morning. Never mind that I had to actually push for it and it wasn't offered immediately

And at around 2040 BA started to sell loads of seats on the Tuesday LHR - ORK flights.

And then around 2130 Aer Lingus did the same but with no seats on the EI711 anymore beside 1 AERSPACE.

I did forget to take a screenshot of all that availability because I was on the phone while it happend but I got a screenshot of the "last available" seats in AERSPACE which I wanted as I wanted to go home (and I had AERSPACE booked anyhow, for a higher fare none the less).

Plus, on the actual flight 1 C was empty (so where some other seats further down) so titan18 should have had no problems being on that.

Aer Lingus clearly was playing games, or they just made all flights available with the original loads/fares once it became clear the flights would happen and did not move people until either people contacted them or they got time over night to move people. That is the only way that there were so cheap fares available.

Ya, they have handled this poorly. Probably not the only one who spent a ton of money and time trying to get through to them too.

Id say fair enough if their customer service people did the best they could to get people on earliest flights out but they didn't.