Jet2 calls for urgent change after 7,000 customers hit by air traffic control chaos

Jet2 is repatriating thousands of customers whose travel plans were cancelled during the flight disruption last week caused by an air traffic control glitch.

Hundreds of thousands of passengers are thought to have had their flights disrupted last week due to a technical issue on the system run by the National Air Traffic Services (Nats), the UK’s air traffic control provider.

An alert was sent out on Tuesday, 8 September over an issue with the Nats’ system, causing flight chaos which lasted until as late as Thursday evening.

Over 2,000 flights were affected by the outage, including those run by low-cost airline Jet2.

At the peak of disruption, around 7,200 Jet2 customers who were due to fly back to the UK required additional assistance and repatriation support, according to the airline.

Now, Jet2 said that “customers whose plans were cancelled will receive a full refund”.

All customers who had a flight or package holiday cancelled will be given a full refund from Jet2. These will be processed automatically, so customers do not need to take further action to claim this.

Under air passenger rights rules, if a flight departing from the UK or the EU is delayed or cancelled, the passenger is entitled to either a refund or an alternative flight to their destination as close to the original schedule as possible.

If a passenger does not seek a refund, airlines have a duty to fly a passenger to their destination as soon as possible, which airlines did once the air traffic control system started to recover after Tuesday’s incident.

The airline is also now calling for urgent action to improve Nats so a failure like this will not happen again.

Jet2 said it had to arrange extra flights, deploy additional teams and use all available aircraft capacity to fly customers home from destinations like Greece, Turkey, Spain and Malta.

More than a dozen extra flights were added by Jet2 to recuperate their flight schedule, alongside ground transport support in the UK.

The airline said its staff from across its company, including flight crew, operational teams and customer support, “worked around the clock” to support customers and arrange hotel accommodation.

Steve Heapy, CEO of Jet2, said: “This latest failure caused significant disruption to thousands of our customers through no fault of their own, and once again airlines, colleagues and customers were left to pick up the pieces because critical national infrastructure failed.

“That is completely unacceptable and holidaymakers deserve much better. The government has a direct responsibility given its 49 per cent ownership of NATS, and with customers needing confidence and airlines needing certainty, proper answers are required following this latest failure.”

Nats chief Martin Rolfe is due to submit a report this week after investigating the cause of the technical issue.

Read more: Passengers unlikely to get compensation as UK airports return to normal after days of flight chaos