- Author, Marc Waddington and Jonny Humphries
- Role, BBC news
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Some passengers whose travel plans were thrown into chaos by a power outage at Manchester Airport are facing further delays as airlines rearrange their grounded flights.
Airport bosses said all systems had returned to “normal functioning” but urged passengers to check the status of their flights before traveling.
It said airlines will contact travelers whose flights were canceled on Sunday.
The airport said it will “likely be slightly busier than normal” throughout Monday due to passengers affected by cancellations.
According to Manchester’s live departure board, there were several delays of an hour or more, including a 07:30 BST flight to Ibiza that was due to depart at 08:30.
A flight to Bourgas in Bulgaria, which was due to depart at 6:05 am, was postponed until 9:41 am.
Travel expert Simon Calder told BBC 5Live that Sunday’s events could have a “serious” impact on aviation by “damaging confidence”.
He said: “There are going to be people who take one look at this, look at the stress, the fear and the upset, and the not knowing what’s going on, and say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do that.’
“This will have consequences for the activities of an airport, and possibly also for the activities of airports in a broader sense.”
Mr Calder said the sector was ‘competitive’, with Manchester at risk of losing out to alternative airports.
He added: “If people are chatting in the pub and say ‘well I used Liverpool John Lennon Airport and it was fine, nice and quiet, it seems to be working well’ then you could see a cohort of people that actually goes away from Manchester Airport to another airport.”
The airport said it had deployed additional staff to help deal with the backlog, and that passengers should generally arrive two hours before their flight for short flights and three hours for long flights.
From the early hours of Sunday, outbound flights were grounded and scheduled arrivals diverted to other UK airports.
According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, 66 outbound flights (25% of all departures) and 50 inbound trips (18% of all arrivals) had been canceled by lunchtime.
At around 7.30pm BST, airport bosses said flights had resumed and vowed to launch an investigation into what happened.
Passengers whose flights were canceled described the situation at the airport as “chaos”, and photos shared on social media showed large queues and jammed baggage carousels full of luggage.
There are reports that some people’s luggage is not being loaded onto planes.
Kelvin Knaver, from St Helens, was due to fly to Amsterdam with EasyJet.
He told BBC North West Tonight: “It’s been a mess. There’s such a backlog it’s going to take forever to clear.”
EasyJet saw the highest number of cancellations. It said the delays were “beyond its control” and that it was doing “everything possible to minimize the impact of the disruption”.
One Singapore Airlines flight from Houston, Texas was diverted to London Heathrow, while another flight from Singapore had to land at London Gatwick.
An Etihad Airways flight from Abu Dhabi was forced to land at Birmingham Airport instead.
Chris Woodroofe, the chief executive of Manchester Airport, said he regretted the delays and that staff “ensured that the impact [did] will not continue” in the coming days.
The disruption was caused by a “fault” in a cable at the airport, which sent a surge of electricity across the electricity network, he said.
Have you been affected by the disruption at Manchester Airport?