Family stuck on Heathrow tarmac ‘without food’ for five hours during UK flight chaos

A family with young children were stranded on the Heathrow tarmac for almost five hours before being told the flight was going nowhere.

Rupert Myers, his wife and two young boys are among the thousands of passengers who have been caught in the travel mayhem, which is continuing today as airlines struggle to resume normal operations.

The barrister, from London, and his sons, aged one and three, were on their way for a holiday in Toulouse, France yesterday when the journey hit an unexpected wall at Heathrow due to the Nats air traffic control system glitch.

They were able to book another flight from Stansted today, but are likely to be hundreds of pounds out of pocket due to lost bookings.

Rupert, 41, and the family had already boarded the flight when the captain made the announcement to warn about the issue.

A ‘very kind’ stewardess handed food to his sons after they had spent hours on the aircraft.

He told Metro: ‘My sons were very teary when we had to get off the plane. I’m very upset about that, but they were very patient throughout the experience.’

‘They could have let us off early. They could have realised we were not going to take off.

‘We were not given any substantial food.

‘My sons got very hungry, but they said we had been there for so long that they couldn’t serve the meals because they had been out of the refrigerators for too long, and they couldn’t sell us any food because payment systems were down.

‘Eventually, a very kind air stewardess snuck some snacks to us, but was very careful to make sure that nobody else saw, because otherwise there would be a kind of run on the food.

‘It wasn’t great, and not what you expect.

Eventually, the passengers were let out after it dawned that no flights would be taking off, and Rupert managed to snatch a flight from Stansted, which is expected to get them to their destination later today.

BA offered to fly them to Toulouse on Saturday via an overnight stop in Brussels tomorrow, but they would have missed almost half of the holiday and risk losing the hotel bookings.

He said: ‘So far, we have just missed a day, but it’s the hotel and the car.

‘I haven’t been able to contact the hire company, and sometimes they cancel it if you don’t turn up.

‘If we lose the car, it is going to be hundreds and hundreds of pounds, and we were going to fly in business class with BA.’

He continued: ‘Last time air traffic control went down in 2023, we were in Portugal and we were stuck there for several days.

‘It feels like rotten luck at this point. It puts you off flying at this point.’

Meanwhile, personal trainer Cathy Smith and her partner Jack Clark, from Baltimore, were returning from Lisbon when their flight was grounded at Heathrow.

Cathy told Metro: ‘We were on the tarmac for four hours. Staff gave us rigatoni and chicken curry and water, but they didn’t know what was happening.’ 

Jack explained that as they had had no signal on the grounded plane they’d been unable to call ahead to book a hotel room. 

He added: ‘By the time passengers were asked to disembark the flight in the evening there were no hotels available for 30 miles. We spent the night on chairs in the airport and are hoping to fly this afternoon.’

A spokesperson for British Airways told Metro: ‘Our teams have worked throughout the night to build a new flight schedule for today (Wednesday 9 September) so we’re able to operate as many flights as we can, following the significant disruption we experienced yesterday as a result of the NATS outage.

‘With so many planes and crew out of place, we were left with no choice but to cancel more than 190 flights of today’s original planned schedule. 

‘While this incident has been completely outside of our control, we do not underestimate the impact it’s had on the tens of thousands of our customers who faced disruption yesterday and today, and we’re very sorry. We’re doing everything we can to get them to where they need to be and ask them to remain patient while we work to find solutions for everyone.  

‘Our phone lines are extremely busy, as are our chat lines, and we ask customers whose flights are cancelled do not come to the airport.   

‘We want to express our thanks to our colleagues, many of whom worked over their shifts or volunteered to come to work to support our customers.’

Has your journey been affected? Please email noora.mykkanen@metro.co.uk

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