‘It’s been a nightmare’: Passengers face airport chaos after UK air traffic issue

Phil White also spoke of incredibly busy scenes in the airport’s baggage reclaim hall, describing it as “carnage” as an influx of disrupted passengers tried to find their luggage.

“All the bags from every cancelled flight were sent to one reclaim carousel. So there were a thousand or so people trying to get close enough to get their cases,” he said.

“The baggage hall was the worst and they’re very lucky that there wasn’t any sort of incident as tempers frayed and the concourse was getting hotter.”

Elsewhere, people spoke of spending the night on the floors of airports and hotels across the globe when flights back into the UK were cancelled.

Sukie Perera, from Cardiff, describing her experience of being stuck in Turkey said “it has been a nightmare” and communication at the airport was poor.

She won’t be able to fly home until Thursday but joked that at least “the view is beautiful”.

Paul Willows, currently in Rhodes, Greece, with his family said they had to sleep on the floor of a hotel’s conference room on Tuesday night.

He said: “They stripped all the cushions off the sunbeds and laid them in the conference room. I dare say there were about 80 of us on the floor.”

Despite it having “not been a comfortable night at all”, Paul said there was a “good element of pulling together” from those impacted.

Alan Jones and Kelly Fewery also said their family was “absolutely exhausted” after sleeping on the floor of Dalaman Airport in Turkey without blankets or pillows.