FLIGHT CHAOS: New York and Shanghai jets end up in Cardiff as air traffic meltdown rolls into day two

Two jets that were never meant to be in Wales spent Tuesday night on Cardiff’s tarmac: a Virgin Atlantic Dreamliner from New York, and a British Airways 787 that set off for Shanghai.

The Virgin jet, flight VS26 from New York JFK, was bound for Heathrow but was sent west as the air traffic failure clogged London’s airspace, touching down in Cardiff just before half past seven on Tuesday evening, FlightRadar24 tracking data shows.

The British Airways aircraft had the stranger evening. Flight BA169 departed Heathrow for Shanghai, but with the network in chaos behind it, turned back over southern England, and with nowhere in London to put it, landed in Wales instead.

London’s airports were “heavily impacted by the earlier NATS technical issue, likely unable to accommodate the diversion”, FlightRadar24 said of the Shanghai flight.

Long-haul visitors of that size are a rare sight at Cardiff these days: the airport’s own Qatar Airways link never returned after the pandemic, and its scheduled traffic is short and medium-haul.

The two Dreamliners were among the strays of a national scattering. By the end of Tuesday, more than 1,750 flights had been cancelled UK-wide, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium, with around 170 more axed by this morning, almost all of them at Heathrow, tracking service FlightRadar24 says.

Travel journalist Simon Calder told Sky News that at least 75,000 people had their plans wrecked on Tuesday, with thousands more “scattered to various corners of Europe” on diverted aircraft.

British Airways has warned of knock-on effects through today, with some flights up to nine hours late, and says customers booked to travel this week can change flights free on its website after it cancelled or diverted more than 100 services, leaving “aircraft and crews ending up out of place”.

NATS boss summoned as cyber attack ruled out

The bill for the chaos is now being argued over in London. NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe has been summoned to meet Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander today, and she is expected to tell MPs a cyber attack was “categorically” not the cause, the BBC reports.

Mr Rolfe says the failure related to flight data the system received, telling The Independent that what he described as “dodgy” data took the system down, and that the fault was first spotted at 8.30am, three hours before the automatic system went offline.

That explanation drew disbelief from the top of the industry. Willie Walsh, director-general of global airline body IATA, told BBC Radio 4: “I find it staggering, I really do. This system should be designed to reject data that’s incorrect, not to collapse the system.”

Mr Rolfe has apologised and promised a full investigation, admitting the fix took “longer than hoped”. Asked whether he was considering his position, he said there would be “lots of time for that later”, and he rejected claims the service is failing, telling the BBC: “I do think we’re fit for purpose.”

The airlines are less patient. Ryanair, which says more than 65,000 of its passengers were delayed, has repeated its call for Mr Rolfe to go, while Wizz Air said NATS was “not fit for purpose” in its current form.

It is the third serious failure in three years: Tuesday’s fault followed a radar problem at NATS’s Swanwick centre in July 2025 and the 2023 flight-plan meltdown that hit 700,000 passengers.

For Welsh travellers, the picture this morning is calmer than the headlines: no fresh cancellations have been reported at Cardiff or Bristol, with the residual damage concentrated at Heathrow, though anyone flying today should still check with their airline first. What you can claim if your flight is hit is in our explainer at the link above.

The chaos bookends a strange 24 hours for Cardiff Airport, which woke on Tuesday to passengers ranking it fifth best in the UK and went to bed hosting other airports’ jumbo-sized problems.

The Dreamliners will be ferried back east as slots allow. For one strange evening, south Wales was where Britain’s broken airspace parked its widebodies.