The NATS outage: what you can still claim

Air traffic control stopped working on the afternoon of Tuesday 8 September, and

around 1,750 flights were cancelled. Heathrow and Gatwick took the worst of it,

and the knock-on ran into Wednesday.

If that was your flight, there is one thing worth knowing before you write to

anybody.

The fixed payment is off. The rest is not

The fixed cash payment of £220 to £520 is the airline paying for its own

failures. This was not one: the airline had a plane, a crew and you, and was

told it could not fly. So that payment is almost certainly off.

What is not off, and what almost nobody tells you in the same breath:

• Your hotel, meals and transport. What you actually spent, against your

receipts. No cap, no tariff.

• A refund for any flight you did not take.
• A seat on the earliest alternative, including on another airline if yours

is full for days.

None of those depend on whose fault it was.

What we have added

A guide that says all of that in plain English, with the two days it covers, the

airports we know were hit, and who to write to.

And a shorter way in. Tell us the airline, the day and what happened, and pick

one of four things: your hotel and meals back, a refund, another flight, or help

now if you are still stuck. We date the letter to the outage, ask for the thing

you picked, and leave the fixed payment out of it.

The reason that matters: a letter opening with a demand for £520 gets a one line

refusal, and the refund and the hotel bill you had not got round to asking for go

with it.

One exception

If your delay carried on after air traffic control was running again, and the

reason was the airline's own crew or aircraft, the fixed payment can come back

into play for that later stretch. Say what happened and when, and we will ask

them to put in writing where they draw the line.