Transport Secretary under pressure over widespread air cancellations

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More than 2,000 flights to and from UK airports were axed on Tuesday and today after a technical issue hit the National Air Traffic Service (NATS), responsible for air traffic control services at 15 British airports.

Tens of thousands of passengers were caught up in the chaos, which affected Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted airports and led to further cancellations today.

NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe apologised for the issue but dodged questions over whether he would resign, a demand raised by some airlines.

He said: “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.”

On the cause of the problem, Mr Rolfe said a “thorough” investigation would take place, but ruled out a cyber attack.

He added: “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’ll be working on that through the course of today.

“And then our attention will turn to exactly what’s happened in this particular incident.”

Discussing the response to Tuesday’s incident, Mr Rolfe said: “This was resolved as quickly as it could be, but within the limits of making sure that it all stayed safe.”

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