Anyone else stuck in an airport?

[princesspadam]

With the flight chaos????

no idea what time we’ll be leaving or if it’ll even happen

We are in Marrakesh. The airport staff are saying our flight this evening is cancelled and asking everyone to leave, but BA are claiming it’s just delayed for a couple of hours

I live between Heathrow and Gatwick. There's not a single plane to be seen in the sky here. There's always planes to be seen but right now the sky is empty.

DS is sitting in Luton with no signs of anything moving...

The news are saying it’s being worked on
Can you imagine the chaos? Hope people start moving soon.

It’s the Russians according to LBC 😄. Hope it all gets resolved quickly.

Did lbc mention the Russians ? Surprised.
😮

Yes I'm stuck in Rome until Thursday now - was supposed to have been flying out last night 😞

No, that is definitely tinfoil hat territory. The truth - IT glitch - is far less dramatic. Nothing to do with terrorists or Russians.

Don't all the airports have separate air traffic control systems, or are they centralised? If the latter I can fully understanding the glitch, but if the former ....??

The fault appears to have originated in the flight planning handling side of ATC, which by it's nature has to be fairly central and shared to some degree (because in simple terms flight plans are used amongst other things to deconflct flights on similar or identical routes).

AFAIK the actual control side of things the airports themselves are generally more segregated but as you go up to higher levels it gets more centralised.

As much as anything because with the aircraft speeds involved it makes it easier and safer to coordinate across the entire airspace (most of the higher UK airspace is run out of one building)

Fundamentallly though whether segregated or not these days without data from flight plans it's impossible to keep the system flowing at anything like normal capacity..

..and the really important thing about yesterday is that the system degraded and came to a halt in a safe manner...

😊 thank you for the explanation. Awful for everyone involved 😞

You're welcome..ATC wasn't my aisle in the aviation world so I'm open to correction on what I wrote..

What I think it is safe to say is ATCs job these days isn't just about looking.out of windows or at screens and keeping aircraft apart, as demand for flights as increased it's increasingly also become about traffic management/flow control.

That's in part why there's a need to know where flights are planning to go and when, and that's where the flight planning system and flight plans come into the equation.

If that side of things falls apart then the whole system struggles/stops - for safeties sake.

I don't work in ATC but a very close family member is a senior manager. Agree that safety is always the top priority. If a system fails then it's always safer to have planes sitting on the ground rather than trying to carry on. Uncomfortable and inconvenient, but better than the potential alternative. Also once you have the system back up and running the engineers have to go through loads of stress testing to make sure it's really fixed and working as it should be before giving the go ahead to start operations again. This is not a 5 minute job. I would imagine the CEO will be forced to resign over this happening twice, and the government may call people to Select Committee to thrash out why it happened.

The other issue is that at present there are not enough trained controllers - and controllers who are trained on specific tasks. You can't take a controller who works at Hesathrow tower giving planes clearance to land and put him/her behind a screen managing airspace at higher levels over the Atlantic without a lot of training. During the pandemic there were no new people recruited or started training because of the issues of working in close proximity to others. Then people retire, or want to go part time rather than full time, or leave for a better salary in Dubai/Qatar and there's a shortage of trained people.

DS sat on a plane for seven hours yesterday then they were all taken off and sent away without their luggage. He got home at 2am. Flight rescheduled for tomorrow but from a different airport. Goodness only knows whether the suitcases will arrive with him. He’s off today to pick up some basics to take on as hand baggage.

Now to arrange transport to Gatwick as I assume he’ll fly back into Heathrow as it was the original departure airport.

The BA phones lines are jammed and the website keeps crashing. Bloody nightmare for everyone involved.

We were there all day yesterday ready to go to gran canaria. It got cancelled at the gate after HOURS. I had a mild cold/lergy brewing. I now feel like death warmed up. The mob mentality was awful, people were screaming at each other, screaming at staff, no internet working, the apps were patchy. Utter chaos. It was really upsetting. We finally got home. We couldnt' get another flight all week in the airport as the app kept freezing. So we came home. Then we get an email (no text) saying we have successfully rebooked a flight at 7am. (by the time I saw it it was 5am so there was no chance we could go - we are three hours from the airport - and now im also too ill to fly). Went on BA app, and thats down so I dont even know for sure if it was a correct booking.

Ive never had to get money back off a holiday before. It ws 1800 to gran canaria. Will i get all that moeny back? Can't get through to Love holidays at all. Been on hold for hours.

Im so gutted and upset. I can get my head around it being rescheduled but not to lose all the money.

I’m flying home tomorrow. The app was slow but while I was in the queue for customer assistance it offered me a Thursday flight also from LCY, I didn’t want to have to go to Heathrow with my heavy suitcase so that worked well. It wasn’t as awful an experience as many people had, mostly I think because London City is a very small airport so shorter distance to move around and fewer passengers. Once I left the queue for assistance I had to queue again to go baggage claim and pick up my suitcase because they didn’t want to overwhelm the exit area, but it wasn’t a long wait. And then there was a queue for a taxi but it was well managed. I would have taken the DLR if I hadn’t had a suitcase and that seemed to have plenty of capacity. The system that gave passengers credit on an app to buy food or to take public transport worked, but slowly probably because so many were trying to access it. It took a few tries over the course of half an hour before I could download it.

It really helped me that I have somewhere to stay here and no particular rush to get home. The poor woman in the queue next to me was on a day business trip and only had her handbag and laptop, and she needed to get home in order to leave again this evening for another business trip to a different country. She was a lot calmer than I would have been in her position.

We got refunded for almost all of it. So thats a huge relief. Horrid experience though.