Fasten your seat belts, this ride can only get worse

High summer has brought crowded skies and fears of chaos in air traffic control. But why are Brits the only ones experiencing holiday hell, asks Sonia Purnell. Opposite, she tells tales from last weekend, the busiest of the year. On Sunday alone, a million people caught 4,000 flights in and out of the UK

Control overload

We are entering a golden age of air travel in Europe. No, really. This idea will provoke bitter laughter if you are one of the thousands of British holidaymakers sweating it out in sultry, crowded airport buildings today, or stuck on the tarmac in an aircraft that is going nowhere. But the experts say it is true.

The mutineers who staged a sit-in on an easyJet flight from Nice last week won't believe this, and those who warn of impending doom in our busy skies will protest, but the statistics prove the case: thanks to enormous investment in air traffic control systems and their operators across the continent, flight delays have never been so short, or so rare.

For everyone, that is, except passengers travelling to or from Britain. While the European average delay is now down to just one minute per flight, the worst of the British charter airlines touch down, on average, nearly two hours late.

Worse, more than half of all delays in Europe caused by air traffic control problems – the major reason for late flights – are now attributed to the virtual breakdown of the new £623m UK control centre at Swanwick in Hampshire.

"If a plane flies from Rome to Frankfurt, there's no traffic control reason for it to be late," says John Byrom of Eurocontrol, the body that co-ordinates air traffic control across the continent. "If it's coming from Heathrow to Frankfurt, it's just expected to be late, and usually is. The UK is now the only major bottleneck in Europe."

Nor can Britons hope to catch up with the European jet set in the near future. The planned new runways and airports announced by the Government last month will take an already overloaded control system to breaking point, and beyond. Ministers expect the number of passengers who use UK airports to rise from the current 180 million a year to 500 million by 2030.

A memo leaked from Swanwick chiefs last week admitted they were running a "dire" service with 3,500 hours of delays in a single week in July, and warned the system might be beyond salvation, even without a rise in traffic levels.

Swanwick has been plagued by computer crashes, safety fears and complaints from controllers that they cannot read the screens, leading to fears of near-misses. A severe staffing shortage – of between 40 and 100 controllers, depending who you ask – has led to vast areas of British airspace being closed to commercial aircraft because there is simply no one to watch them.

There should be 25 "sectors" open to air traffic in British skies. The final weekend in July is the peak of the holiday travel season, and last Sunday a million holidaymakers passed through British airports. But a lack of fully trained controllers meant no fewer than eight sectors were closed down.

"It is equivalent to closing off the entire third lane of the M25 during the rush hour," says David Luxton, general secretary of Prospect, the controllers' union. "The traffic has to be tightly regulated in the remaining sectors, leading to delays in pilots taking off and lengthy stacking in the air until they can land again."

Prospect says safety will be compromised if money is not spent on easing the burden on its members, but training new controllers will take at least three years. In the meantime, existing staff are being offered special payments of £500 for every extra seven-hour shift worked as overtime. Many are already stressed enough to spurn the money, and absenteeism is at an all-time high.

"National Air Traffic Services [Nats] used to be the air traffic control flagship of the world, but no longer," says Carolyn Evans, technical secretary of the pilots' union Balpa. "Most airlines have sensible, flexible schedules for pilots to catch up on the UK delay problem through the day, but those with tighter turn-around times such as the no-frills operators are finding the traffic control delays a nightmare. Very few of their services are now able to run on time."

Add in the usual run of mechanical failures, passengers turning up late, and severe weather – such as the thunderstorm which shut down Ibiza airport last week – and the domino effect can quickly bring an entire airport to a standstill.

As airlines swap and match crews and planes all over Europe in a frantic effort to meet the demand, a single delay can cause knock-on effects that leave passengers stranded at home and in apparently unconnected terminals in other countries. The problems are too complex for airline staff to explain to their irate customers properly – even when they can be bothered.

Passengers to and from southern Europe bear the brunt of the delays. "Transatlantic flights are still down 10 to 12 per cent since 11 September," a Nats spokesman explains. "People are swapping to short-haul Mediterranean destinations, which are up by 7 per cent this year. With increased demand comes increased delays; it's a fact of life."

Palma – in Majorca – has the reputation in the business as the world's worst holiday airport. "It's notorious for having loads of holiday charter planes all wanting to land there at the same time to tie in with the hotel beds being changed," explained one airline insider. More than three million tourists visit the island every year, most of them from Britain or Germany, and the monolithic hotels that line the south coast like to get rid of one batch of holidaymakers and bring in the next on the same day. It is easier on the chambermaids that way but it has repercussions from Swindon to Stuttgart as planes carrying tanned returnees queue for a take-off slot and their replacements stack up in the air waiting for the chance to land.

"There only has to be a problem with one aircraft for the whole airport to come screeching to a halt and fill up with masses of teeming people feeling hot, irate and sweaty," says the insider, who does not wish to be named. "Although it's happening all the time, they just can't deal with it."

Nor would a summer be complete without a strike by French and Spanish air traffic controllers, of course, and they have not disappointed this year. Baggage handlers in this country have also threatened to picket the carousels unless they receive improved pay. BAA, which operates seven of Britain's major airports, is struggling to recruit enough security staff to reduce the queues for baggage screening.

The only way to avoid holiday hell in future, as more terminals and runways lead to greater crowds, may be to take your break in this country. The queues on the motorway will be just as bad, but at least the rain will cool you down.

bmi, Cagliari

Flashing lights, a mid-air U-turn, 25 hours' delay

The delay would be 15 minutes, said the airline staff, no more. Then time passed and the passengers expecting to board Flight BD7006 from Cagliari to Heathrow last Saturday found they had been waiting a couple of hours.

It was a relief to get on the plane, but something appeared to be going wrong: the lights were flickering on and off, the passengers' TV screens flipping up and down. These electrical faults were in no way affecting the engines, said staff, but their reassurances seemed hollow soon after take-off when the plane was forced to turn back over the sea and return to Cagliari, due to "a technical difficulty".

It was subsequently reported in a local newspaper that their aircraft had been forced to ditch all its fuel, because of a full-scale emergency, but BMI British Midland denies this.

Back on the ground, the passengers were, according to one, left "sitting in an underground, poorly ventilated and appallingly appointed departure lounge where we received absolutely no information about what would happen next".

Ground staff knew nothing, it appeared, although later, they said it was "99 per cent" certain that a replacement plane would be sent out from London. Calls to the airline's London offices failed to find anyone on duty to answer queries – despite it being one of the busiest travel days of the year. Eventually, refreshment vouchers worth 6 euros each were handed out, but staff were still unable – or unwilling – to impart any further information.

Twelve hours on, passengers were summoned to the check-in counter, only to be told their in-coming flight had been turned away because the lights had failed at Cagliari airport. Despondent, several people gave up waiting and booked themselves into a hotel for the night.

A replacement plane did turn up the next morning and, despite more flickering lights, it did get passengers to Heathrow, 25 hours late. They were greeted on the ground by a man handing out not apologies but British Midland press releases. "We felt we had been treated with total disrespect, that we had been lied to, ignored and patronised," said a passenger.

In a statement afterwards, the airline said it regretted the "extended delay" and apologised for the discomfort and disruption experienced. It claimed to have kept its staff at Cagliari fully informed of developments, but apologised that they had not communicated this information on to waiting passengers.

easyJet, Nice

Get off the plane? No! No! No!

Maybe it was the heat. Something triggered 130 passengers on the 22.40 easyJet flight from Nice to Luton last Sunday night to mutiny.

A request from the pilot just before take-off to leave the plane and wait for another sparked a spontaneous protest and a near-unanimous refusal to move.

EasyJet said the pilot had asked the passengers to disembark because another plane, bound for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, had developed technical problems after its passengers had already been delayed three hours. The pilot wanted to use his plane for those passengers, promising that a new plane would be sent from Luton for the ones who were already on board.

This idea did not appeal, and was met with shouts of "No! No! No!".

One of the passengers said afterwards: "All of the passengers on our flight protested. There were chants of 'Everyone stay on the plane!' and 'Don't let them do this to us!' There was an impromptu sit-in protest and everyone refused to get off."

No refreshments were offered in the overheated cabin as all but 10 of the passengers sat it out. Eventually, the Paris-bound flight resolved its mechanical problems and was able to take off. The Luton-bound passengers also eventually got home, rather later than expected.

An easyJet spokesman said: "We were treating the interests of all our passengers as a priority, rather than just one flight."

go, Alicante

The babies protested

It was 40 degrees in the shade when the passengers boarded the 13.50 Go flight from Alicante last Saturday lunchtime, so there was disappointment when the pilot announced that they would have to wait another 50 minutes for a take-off slot.

Morale plunged further when the power cut out during the course of the safety demonstration, which shut off the air-conditioning unit and sent the cabin temperature soaring.

Passengers were then told they would have to wait for the ground-crew to bring a new generator, causing yet another delay.

As they sat there waiting for nearly another hour, the babies on board began to voice their own protests about the unbearable heat. The refreshments handed out by the cabin crew amounted to half a tumbler of water for each of the passengers.

"I'd rather they'd bought me a stiff gin than that," said one woman on board, who had a baby son on her lap. "How on earth are you going to rehydrate someone with half a glass of water?

"Frankly, it was insulting – they treated us like cattle. They didn't even give us a proper apology."

The flight took off an hour and a half late. "It wasn't a huge delay, just the average crap you get used to," said the woman. "But it was really claustrophobic, and made me realise that these vehicles we treat like buses are actually complicated contraptions that easily go wrong."

A Go spokesman said: "We could only offer what was on board. Calling for more supplies would have meant additional delays."