- Author, Marc Waddington and Jonny Humphries
- Role, BBC News
-
Some passengers whose travel plans were disrupted by a power outage at Manchester Airport face further delays as airlines rebook their flights.
Airport management said all systems were back to “normal” but urged passengers to check the status of their flight before traveling.
It said airlines would contact travelers whose flights were canceled on Sunday.
The airport said it would “likely be a little busier than usual” throughout Monday due to passengers affected by cancellations.
According to Manchester’s live departures board, there were several delays of an hour or more, including a flight to Ibiza scheduled to depart at 07:30 BST at 08:30.
A flight to Burgas in Bulgaria, scheduled to depart at 06:05, was delayed to 09:41.
Travel expert Simon Calder told BBC 5Live that Sunday’s events could have a “serious” impact on aviation by “shattering confidence”.
He said: “There are going to be some people who will just look at all this, see the stress and the anxiety and the excitement and the uncertainty and say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do that.’
“This will impact an airport’s business, and potentially even the business of airports more broadly.”
Mr Calder said the industry was “competitive” and Manchester was at risk of losing out to alternative airports.
He added: “If people are chatting in the pub and saying, ‘Well, I used Liverpool John Lennon Airport and it was OK, nice and not crowded, seems to work quite well’, then it could be that a group of people are actually moving from Manchester Airport to another airport.”
The airport said it had deployed additional staff to clear the backlog. Passengers should generally arrive two hours before departure for short-haul flights and three hours before departure for long-haul flights.
From the early hours of Sunday morning, all departing flights were cancelled and scheduled arrivals were diverted to other UK airports.
According to aviation analysis firm Cirium, 66 outbound flights (25% of all departures) and 50 return flights (18% of all arrivals) had been cancelled by midday.
At around 19:30 BST, airport management announced that flight traffic had resumed and announced an investigation into the incident.
Passengers whose flights were cancelled described the situation at the airport as “chaos”, and photos shared on social media showed long queues and blocked baggage carousels packed to the brim with luggage.
There are reports that some people’s luggage was not loaded onto the planes.
Kelvin Knaver from St. Helens was scheduled to fly to Amsterdam with EasyJet.
He told BBC North West Tonight: “It’s a mess. There’s such a backlog that it’s going to take forever to clear it.”
EasyJet recorded the most cancellations. The airline said the delays were “beyond its control” and that it was “doing everything possible to minimise the impact of the disruption”.
A Singapore Airlines flight from Houston, Texas, was diverted to London Heathrow, while another flight departing from Singapore had to land at London Gatwick.
An Etihad Airways flight from Abu Dhabi had to land at Birmingham Airport instead.
Chris Woodroofe, chief executive of Manchester Airport, said he regretted the delays and that staff would “ensure that the impact [did] not continue” in the next few days.
The disruption was caused by a “fault” in a cable at the airport that sent a surge of electricity through the power grid, he said.
Were you affected by the disruptions at Manchester Airport?