Holidaymakers heading home from Turkey back to the UK were still experiencing major issues after the Bank Holiday air traffic control failure meant flight plans caused delays and cancellations.

Around 790 flights on Monday departing UK airports were cancelled and 785 arriving flights, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. This equates to about 27% of all planned flights, it added.

National Air Traffic Services (Nats), the country’s leading provider of air traffic control, said on Monday at 3.15pm that it had “identified and remedied” the technical issue affecting its systems and it was working with airlines and airports to support affected flights.

The airline industry will bear costs of as much as £100m because of the UK air traffic control collapse on Monday, according to the former chief executive of British Airways’ owner who now leads the industry’s lobby group.

Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association (Iata), said that 1,100 flights were cancelled and hundreds of thousands of passengers had their journeys affected.

He told BBC Radio’s Today programme: “We’re looking at costs in the tens of millions, probably at this stage – too early to estimate fully – but I would imagine at an industry level we’ll be getting close to £100m of additional costs that airlines have encountered as a result of this failure.”

That was little comfort for a family’s dream holiday costing £5,000 which ended in disaster as children were left sleeping on an airport floor due to air traffic control chaos.

Julie Shaw publicly criticised TUI for its handling of the travel disruption which resulted in her grandchildren being forced to sleep on the cold, hard floor of an airport.

Julie, her husband Joe, and their two young granddaughters, aged eight and six, had enjoyed a week-long holiday in sunny Turkey. However, their idyllic getaway quickly turned into a nightmare when they encountered difficulties returning home to Scholar Green, Cheshire.

The family was scheduled to fly on TOM715 at 1.40pm on Bank Holiday Monday. Unfortunately, a significant UK air traffic control failure necessitated manual input of flight plans by controllers, causing severe delays.

This technical glitch led to an agonising near 24-hour delay, during which time the young children attempted to sleep on the airport floor as they were initially prohibited from leaving the premises.

While Julie acknowledges that the air traffic control issues were beyond anyone’s control, she firmly believes that TUI’s management of the situation was subpar. The family finally boarded a plane on Tuesday (August 29) around lunchtime.

A distressed Julie, 59, recounted: “We spent 23 hours at Dalaman Airport. There was no hotel and no reps to help. Dalaman was a nightmare. Apparently the cabin crew knew we weren’t going fly on 29, Aug 2023.”

The issue wasn’t just the technological mishap, but the treatment of the passengers that sparked outrage. Children were left hungry and thirsty, with a meal for four at McDonald’s costing an exorbitant £50. Some passengers, without extra money, were in dire need of essentials like nappies and milk. Compensation claims and complaints about the treatment are expected to follow.

Julie, one of the affected passengers, estimates they have been left £150 out of pocket. TUI, in a message sent to the stranded family, apologised for the delay to their flight TOM715 from Dalaman to Manchester, citing Air Traffic Control outages in the UK as the cause of the disruption. They made the difficult decision to reschedule the flight to depart on August 29.

A family from Northern Ireland who were on holiday in Turkey told UTV that they were stuck on the runway for “three hours” amid flight chaos caused by an air traffic control fault. Emma Lloyd, a mum of two, was due to fly home from Dalaman on Monday.

Emma Lloyd

Ms Lloyd told UTV that it was clear something wasn’t right, shortly after her family boarded the plane. “Once we were sitting for a while on the plane the pilot made the announcement that there was problems with flights leaving the airport and going into the UK.”

Emma explained that the flight was sitting on the runway for three hours. Passenger were then told they may have to fly to Amsterdam and stay there overnight.

That didn’t happen as all passengers were then taken off the plane and brought back into Dalaman Airport. Ms Lloyd said there were issues around communication: “They didn’t really update us very well in the airport. Everybody was sitting around and not getting many updates so there was a lot of people everywhere”.

Emma and her family had no option but to sleep on wooden benches in the Airport till 4am. They were then driven to a hotel almost two and a half hours away, only to be woken two hours after arriving to be told they needed to get back on the bus and return to the airport.

“There was no real point in going out to that hotel last night for the two hours,” said Emma. “It was such a long journey and a lot of angry, tired people and young children and there were some people in the airport that needed medicine and were without their luggage for quite a while as well.”

Emma’s children were due to start back at school on Tuesday but those plans have been scrapped, leaving both of them upset.

National Air Traffic Services said a flight plan that its systems could not process was behind Monday’s technical problem. The fault saw passengers stranded abroad and in the UK, having to find alternative routes home.

Nats confirmed there were no signs the failure was caused by a cyber-attack. The incident will be investigated by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).