CHAOS caused by the failure of the UK’s air traffic control system will have left some passengers in “a terrible situation”, according to one of the stars of the TV series Airline.
Jane Boulton said she sympathised with staff trying to cope with the disruption and hard-pressed holidaymakers stranded abroad.
She told GB News: “Whenever there is any disruption from the people that are at the airport, from their perspective, we are very reliant or were reliant on what operations were telling us what to do and sometimes things were still being worked out in the background.
“So you actually didn’t know sometimes what to tell people and obviously nobody wants to hear that, but you’re in a difficult situation, do you lie and say ‘yeah, you’re going to be going in an hour’ and actually that’s not going to happen?
“It’s never an easy situation, especially recently with what’s happened. People won’t know what’s going on.”
In a discussion during Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, she continued: “People can have their five minutes of frustration but, yeah, I do feel for my colleagues and people working there but I do also feel for the passengers’ perspective how awful and frustrating it is.
“Most people have spent the money, so to be faced with the situation of having to re-book a flight and for me, for a family of five, I wouldn’t be able to afford to do that, and accommodation. And of course airlines’ hands are tied because it’s not their fault.
“You’ve got the staff not being able to physically help anybody and the passengers that can’t afford to help themselves, so it’s a terrible situation.”
She added: “I think as an airline, I think I would be looking at answers as to how does this happen? How do we have a system that, if it comes down to one flight plan going in, how was there no backup to that?”
