Flying into and out of the UK has been a nightmare this week, and Transport Secretary  Heidi Alexander has declared the situation ‘completely unacceptable ‘.

Since the beginning of this week, around 2,500 flights to and from UK airports have been cancelled or disrupted, leading to widespread chaos. 

Systems have gone down, and this is not due to cyber attacks.

NATS runs air traffic control services for the UK’s main airports, and its operations have been a shambles, leaving many air travellers stranded. 

British Airways has had to cancel 560 flights as many of its customers voice complaints because they cannot get to their destinations.

The Civil Aviation Authority has been asked to conduct a full-scale investigation into the future of NATS’s systems. 

NATS CEO  Martin Rolfe said: “ We will be doing a very, very thorough and full investigation. We have at this point ruled out cyber; we don’t believe it was a cyber attack.

“My focus and that of the team has been on both getting our system operating back up normally, which it is now, but there’s obviously a huge tail to the disruption, and we will be working on that.

“And then our attention will turn to exactly what’s happened in this particular incident. What I will say is  I don’t believe we’ve ever seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation.”

“I would say the UK has one of the best reputations in the world for its air traffic control service both from a safety perspective and from a resilience perspective.”

Both international airline executives and government officials are calling on Rolfe to be fired immediately. 

“How can you have 1,750 flights cancelled in a day? It’s chaos at UK airports. Why? Because of incompetence and a lack of investment in air traffic control systems. You have so many passengers sleeping in airports, aircrews who do not know what is going on, and connecting flights across the world have been thrown into disarray, said a KLM executive