Hollywood stars including Rebel Wilson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Elizabeth Hurley were among up to 250,000 travellers caught in widespread airport chaos after an air traffic control system failure grounded flights across Britain.
The major technical outage at National Air Traffic Services (NATS), which provides control to 15 British airports, forced the cancellation of 1,750 flights on Tuesday. Heathrow Airport recorded 246 cancellations by 6am on Wednesday, while Gatwick Airport logged 33 cancelled services according to FlightRadar24 data.
Passengers travelling through UK hubs including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted have been warned that knock-on disruption could persist until the end of the month as airlines attempt to recover schedule stability.
Celebrity travellers stranded at Heathrow
Australian actress Rebel Wilson, 46, shared video footage from inside a crowded Heathrow terminal after visiting London for work. Showing passengers surrounding the luggage collection area, she sarcastically wrote "Heathrow awesomeness" before telling fans she was "escaping" the airport after abandoning her travel plans.
Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, 50, was seen pushing a trolley stacked with luggage through Heathrow while wearing a wax jacket as he attempted to catch his flight. Actress Elizabeth Hurley and her son Damian were also spotted inside the same airport.
Former Love Island star Olivia Attwood, 35, arrived at Heathrow pushing a luggage trolley following an appearance at the National Television Awards on Tuesday night. She wore a baggy grey tracksuit and large black sunglasses as she made her way into arrivals.
Sky Sports Formula 1 broadcaster Martin Brundle revealed he was trapped inside a grounded British Airways plane at Heathrow for nine hours without moving. He tweeted: "Great work BA and Heathrow. Nine hours and counting sitting on a plane which has travelled nowhere. At a remote parking bay, no food throughout."
Brundle added: "Mother and baby and a person with a medical condition desperate to get off. As is everyone else. Toilets no longer available as blocked."
Passengers sleep on airport floors
At Heathrow Terminal 4, passengers slept on yoga mats on the floor overnight while awaiting updates on delayed and cancelled flights. Patrick Weston, 45, from Enfield in north London, was planning to fly to Gothenburg in Sweden on Wednesday before his service was axed.
Weston told the Daily Mail: "It's absolute chaos here. You cannot believe this can keep happening in Britain in 2026 with all the technology we have. It was a mini break for me. I have no idea what is happening. There's just a feeling of helplessness."
He added: "It shouldn't be like this in this day and age. That's the frustrating part. Of course, things go wrong. But this is just a regular occurrence now. I am stranded now."
Leeds students Clara Nguyen, 28, and her boyfriend Lihan Chen, 25, were booked on a Heathrow flight to Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday evening that was rescheduled to Wednesday afternoon. They paid for an Airbnb overnight, with Nguyen saying: "The airport tried to help but the service and information from Air Vietnam were poor."
Engineer Felix Abrams, 29, who was travelling to Beijing to visit his girlfriend's family, described his treatment as "demeaning" and alleged "a complete shirking of responsibility" by airport authorities.
Abrams added: "How was the airport not prepared for this? This failure has happened before. It's not our fault. We're not being told anything."
Another passenger travelling from Malaga to Manchester described boarding her easyJet flight on time before being told of an air traffic control delay. "As soon as the doors were closed we were told there was an issue with air traffic control in London and we would be delayed for about one hour and 20 minutes," she told the Daily Mail.
She said the pilot later apologised for an update that was not good news, informing passengers of a delay of "another five hours minimum" before returning to the terminal. "After waiting for steps and buses, we got off and were taken back inside the terminal, then told nothing and left to our own devices. Those with checked baggage had to retrieve that too. No easyJet staff to direct or assist, no information, desks closed; some people without phones were totally lost," she said.
She added that rebooking via the airline mobile app was impossible and other airlines showed no flights until Monday. "My husband has a hospital procedure on Saturday, we don't have enough medications with us to last beyond Thursday and I'm supposed to be back in work tomorrow. Nightmare," she said.
Calls for air traffic chief to resign
NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe faces mounting calls to resign as Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander summoned him to a meeting before addressing MPs in the House of Commons for the Civil Aviation Bill's second reading.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Rolfe apologised for the disruption but dodged questions over whether he would quit. "Inevitably, things do go wrong in complex systems. We never want them to. We always hope they won't, but we absolutely plan for them to and make sure we handle them properly," he said.
Rolfe added: "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." He noted that NATS was partially privatised 25 years ago and has since invested "way more than a billion in technology", adding: "But all of those things don't detract from the fact that when these things happen, it is disappointing and upsetting, for which I apologise."
Rolfe ruled out a cyber attack and promised a thorough investigation. "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," he said, adding that engineers and software partners were on site to resolve the issue safely.
Airline bosses criticize UK infrastructure
Airlines reported widespread disruption across their operations. British Airways was forced to cancel or divert more than 100 flights on Tuesday, affecting tens of thousands of customers. Ryanair reported that over 65,000 of its passengers were disrupted, with 50 scheduled flights cancelled on Tuesday and 250 total cancellations expected to cost the company millions of pounds.
Ryanair chief operations officer Neal McMahon told Times Radio Breakfast that the government should ask Rolfe to resign. "We understand the Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, is going to meet with Martin Rolfe today and we think she should ask him to resign," McMahon said. "We think it's critical that we put in somebody in NATS at the top who can deliver resilience, who can deliver the extra staffing that's needed so that NATS can perform as well as other ATC providers across Europe."
McMahon added: "Like, we don't see this in France, we don't see this in Italy, we don't see this in Spain, we don't see this in Ireland, we don't see this in Germany. This is a UK problem where the backup systems don't kick in when the primary systems have a fault."
McMahon said NATS told the airline the disruption was caused by a flight planning processing failure, comparing it to an August 2023 failure that stranded 700,000 passengers when a rogue flight plan sent the system into a loop. "We're told that that was a rogue flight plan and we're told yesterday this was a spurious flight plan which caused the same outage and our question is like: these things can happen, but where's the backup systems? The failing is that the backup system was unable to kick in and work, like it's not a backup system if it shuts down," he said.
Passenger rights and delay compensation
Under UK consumer protection law, flight assistance rules apply to flights departing from UK airports, flights operated by UK or EU airlines arriving at UK airports, and flights operated by UK airlines arriving at EU airports.
Airlines are required to provide assistance based on flight distance. Passengers are entitled to care after a two-hour delay for flights under 1,500km (932 miles), a three-hour delay for flights between 1,500km and 3,500km (2,175 miles), and a four-hour delay for flights over 3,500km.
Required assistance includes a reasonable amount of food and drink vouchers, communication costs such as phone call refunds, and hotel accommodation with transfers if an overnight stay is needed. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) states that if airlines are overwhelmed during major disruption, passengers can organise their own reasonable assistance and submit receipts for reimbursement.
Passengers delayed by more than five hours who decide not to travel are entitled to a full ticket refund. However, compensation for flight delays or cancellations is unlikely to be paid, as air traffic control technical failures are legally classed as extraordinary circumstances outside an airline's control.
