UK air traffic control breakdown strands hundreds of thousands of passengers

More than 1,000 flights cancelled with disruption continuing on Wednesday and airlines calling for overhaul after third incident in just over three years

• UK airport disruption: what are your rights?

Flight delays and cancellations were expected to continue into Wednesday at UK airports after another air traffic control failure kept planes grounded for hours, affecting hundreds of thousands of passengers.

At least 177 flights scheduled for Wednesday to and from UK airports had been cancelled, plane tracking site Flightradar24 said, nearly all at London Heathrow". More than 1,000 were cancelled by about 8pm on Tuesday.