Overview
- Severe thunderstorms on Saturday produced rapid airspace instability that led NATS and Eurocontrol to impose temporary restrictions and reroutings that reduced arrivals and departures at Heathrow and Gatwick.
- Flight trackers and airport statements showed several hundred to nearly 1,000 flights were delayed or cancelled across the two hubs, with some delays reported up to 11 hours and dozens of services axed.
- Airlines including easyJet and British Airways pre-emptively cancelled flights and offered rebooking, refunds and hotel or meal care where required under duty-of-care rules while noting weather is treated as an extraordinary circumstance for compensation.
- Passengers described being stranded in terminals or held on planes for hours as the storm band constrained usable air corridors between south‑east England and north‑west Europe and created cascading crew and aircraft rotation knock‑on effects.
- The disruption followed a record June heatwave — a provisional 37.3°C reading in Suffolk — with meteorologists saying hot, unstable air drove the storms and leaving the potential for further scheduling backlogs into the next day.