LONDON: UK air travellers faced more misery on Wednesday with nearly 300 flights scrapped across the country, as Britain's air traffic control service scrambled to recover from a technical glitch which it ruled out as a cyberattack. After 1,746 flights were cancelled on the first day of the outage on Tuesday another 291 were axed on Wednesday — the majority to and from London Heathrow, the UK's biggest and one of Europe's busiest airports — according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
The head of the National Air Traffic Services (NATS), Martin Rolfe, said "we have at this point ruled out cyber" activity as a cause. "We don't believe it was a cyberattack," he told BBC Radio. Rolfe said NATS will be doing a "very, very thorough" investigation into what exactly caused the incident. National carrier British Airways said it had to cancel more than 190 flights during the incident, which it said affected "tens of thousands of our customers".
UK news outlets reported that British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander had summoned Rolfe to a meeting with her. Alexander said on X that she was "seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job". — AFP
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