Will there be more air travel chaos this summer? – BBC News

Picture this. You’ve reached the end of a much-anticipated holiday in sunnier climes with your family in tow. It’s time to fly home to the UK.

But when you reach the crowded airport, delays are starting to build. You wait and wait and then your flight is cancelled. Information is patchy. The airline should help, but it seems overwhelmed – nobody seems to know what’s going on. Alternative flights are getting booked up quickly. So too are hotels. You end up stuck for days.

That nightmare scenario is what thousands faced at the end of August last year, after an exceptional IT failure at the UK’s main air traffic services provider Nats on a bank holiday Monday. About three quarters of a million people were affected by cancellations or delays.

Last year, extreme weather events, staffing issues in some air traffic control towers and strikes in Europe all caused disruption. Overall, delays were much worse in 2023 than before the pandemic.

And in 2024, airports are expected to be even busier. Air travel is booming again. More people are flying, despite notably higher fares.

So passengers can be forgiven for worrying about more travel chaos – and asking what the industry is doing to tackle the issues that have have caused it.

It won’t just be problems from last year that travellers remember, either. In 2022, post-pandemic staff shortages across the industry lead to chaotic scenes at some airports, and meant some airlines’ planned schedules simply couldn’t be delivered.

Although the picture so far this year is improved, just in the past week there have been examples of cancellations – a power cut at Manchester Airport, and yet another staffing issue affecting air traffic control at Gatwick Airport.

When reading stories of travel chaos, it’s easy to forget that things go fine most of the time. The majority of flights happen as they should. That’s no small feat when you consider what an enormous and constantly moving puzzle aviation is.

But when things do go wrong, for whatever reason, there’s not a lot of room for manoeuvre. Things can easily escalate.

John Grant, senior analyst at travel data firm OAG, says however hard the industry tries, resilience is “always stretched”, as “there is no spare capacity in the system”. It’s an industry run on fine margins.

This year’s high demand will be welcomed by airlines, whose finances are regaining strength after the pandemic. They make their biggest profits in the summer.

But it also means even more pressure on all parts of the industry to make sure things go to plan.

According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, 282,207 flights are due to depart the UK over June, July and August.

That’s still slightly below the 307,538 over the same period in 2019. But the total number of seats available, and passengers at airports, is pretty much back to where it was. Britain’s busiest airport, London Heathrow, is expecting its busiest-ever summer, with 30 million passengers – sometimes over 260,000 per day.

John Grant explains this is because, wherever possible, airlines are using slightly larger aircraft.

That means planes carrying more fare-paying passengers, without needing more pilots – who are in high demand around the world. At Heathrow, for example, the average aircraft flown in the first three months of this year was eight seats larger than the same time in 2019.

If you include “overflights”, such as those passing over to cross the Atlantic, the skies over the UK are very nearly as busy as before the pandemic.

Nats handled the equivalent of 7,340 flights a day in May. That’s 5.9% up on the same time last year. It’s anticipating summer to be 10% busier than 2023.

There’s a similar trend at Eurocontrol, which organises the airspace over the whole of Europe. It expects 7% more traffic this summer than last year, with some areas seeing 20% more than before Covid. At the same time, European airspace is still squeezed due to the Russia-Ukraine war. Eurocontrol told me it’s working with all its partners to “reduce the impact of bottlenecks” and “mitigate any disruptions”.

Well-functioning air traffic control systems are crucial to ensuring all those flights happen safely and on schedule. Nats has been under the spotlight following that incident last August.

From control centres in Swanwick, Hampshire, and Prestwick, Ayrshire, Nats manages the 2.5 million flights per year that cross the UK’s upper airspace – and part of the Atlantic. The organisation also has a commercial arm that provides services at the control towers of 15 UK airports, managing the final approaches of planes as they land or take off.

At the Swanwick control centre, I meet Nats’ chief operations officer Kathryn Leahy. In the room where we stand, all flight due to land at London’s multiple airports, including Heathrow and Gatwick, are kept a safe distance apart before different staff in control towers at airports take over for their final approaches.

At Heathrow, things are particularly tight: a plane lands or takes off every 45 seconds at peak times.

“Busy hours are as busy as they were in 2019,” Ms Leahy says. “So for all intents and purposes we are back to normal.”

The IT failure last year prompted stinging criticism from airlines, who say the incident cost them tens of millions of pounds. The automated system at Swanwick couldn’t understand part of an unusual flight plan, and responded by shutting down. It took hours to rectify, leaving controllers to process flight plans manually – a much, much slower process.

When you think about the volume of traffic being handled, it’s clear why that had such a big impact and why it took so long to resolve. Trade body Airlines UK has since branded Nats’ basic resilience planning and procedures “wholly inadequate”.

Nats has said the exact same issue could not occur again due to a software fix that was found within days and has promised improvements.

Ms Leahy insists Nats is well-resourced for the summer, with engineers, air traffic controllers and assistants on site around the clock. “The priority has absolutely been making sure we’re ready for the demand that’s coming,” she says. She says “no organisation can confirm nothing will happen”, but points out that since last summer, a number of big-traffic days including bank holidays have passed without incident.

An interim report by an independent panel found that communication issues on 2023’s August bank holiday had “resulted in more uncertainty and more severe impacts on passengers and others than was necessary”.

Nats says not only has it “renewed” its crisis response and engineering support processes, but communication with airports and airlines has also been improved – something that Ms Leahy says is crucial.

Daily 16:00 meetings with them have been re-introduced for the first time since before the pandemic. “Demand and traffic for the following day, and known weather situations that might be developing” are discussed, and any other potential issues flagged.