The UK’s London Gatwick airport was plunged into chaos earlier this week when a damaged fibre cable caused an outage that crippled its flight information displays. Staff had to resort to writing out flight numbers and departure times on a whiteboard, while anxious passengers crowded around to try and see it.
Image: Edmund von der Burg via Twitter (@evdb)
A spokesperson for Gatwick acknowledged that a “handful” of passengers had missed their flights due to the issue, adding that “tens of thousands of people” departed on time and no flights were cancelled. Views on social media were mixed: one user called the situation “absolute carnage”, while another praised Gatwick staff for their handling of it.
In February 2018, Gatwick introduced its 4G cloud-based flight information display system, saying it is, “more flexible and resilient, and requires considerably less infrastructure and maintenance”. Vodafone provides network service to the system.
