Ore Oduba and his wife Portia said they were down to the ‘last three nappies’ for their children after being stranded in Greece to the due to air traffic control chaos.
In an Instagram post on Tuesday, mum-of-two Portia explained the situation, saying that they were due to fly back to London yesterday, but their flight was cancelled.
The Strictly Come Dancing star, 37, and his wife, share Roman, four, and one-year-old Genie.
The family were amongst the thousands of stranded Brits who are stuck after 80 per cent of flights leaving the UK have been delayed, with disruptions continuing into the week.
Britain’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) said it experienced ‘technical issues’ that forced controllers to switch from an automatic system for landing and dispatching flights to a manual one, on one of the busiest days of the year.
Nightmare: Ore Oduba and his wife Portia said they were down to the ‘last three nappies’ for their children after being stranded in Greece to the due to air traffic control chaos
In the post, Portia wrote: ‘So currently ‘stranded’ in Greece with no flight home. No nappies and no clean knickers. @easyjet have cancelled all flights leaving till Sunday.
‘But it’s ok. They’ve offered us a voucher for the next time we fly. Maybe we can fly home on that, magic carpet style. I better sharpen up on my Greek as at this rate we are going to become citizens,’ she joked.
‘The next available flight from where we’re staying back to London Gatwick isn’t until Sunday I believe so we’re trying to find an alternative flight, potentially trying to get to another island and fly with a different airline who’s flights are all still leaving.
‘These two as you can imagine were not playing ball earlier whilst we tried to arrange another room.. etc at our hotel. How do kids just know when to kick up?!
‘It’s all been quite stressful as you can imagine – as it will be for many, many people this week. We do however have an amazing travel rep who is trying her very best to get us home! Also, the kids have no clean clothes left and I don’t have any clean knicks… so that’s great. Sink washes all round.’
On Tuesday, officials were probing whether a single badly filed travel plan by a French airline was behind the air traffic control meltdown which resulted in thousands of cancelled flights during the worst outage in more than a decade.
Experts have warned that disruption is set to continue into the week despite the seven-hour ‘network failure’ that left thousands of holidaymakers stranded being ‘remedied’ on Monday afternoon.
Almost 1,000 flights were grounded and cancelled with several more delayed after Britain’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) said it experienced ‘technical issues’. The mayhem happened on one of the busiest days of the year, when more than a million people were due to fly out of or land in the UK.
Awful: In an Instagram post on Tuesday, mum-of-two Portia explained the situation, saying that they were due to fly back to London yesterday, but their flight was cancelled
Update: In the post, Portia wrote: ‘So currently ‘stranded’ in Greece with no flight home. No nappies and no clean knickers. @easyjet have cancelled all flights leaving till Sunday.
Stuck: ‘I better sharpen up on my Greek as at this rate we are going to become citizens,’ she joked
In an extraordinary twist to the fiasco, sources have told The Times that the fault may have been caused by an incorrectly filed plan by a French airline. MailOnline has contacted NATS for comment.
Passengers have been warned that they could face ‘days of disruptions’, which could last until Friday. An easyJet pilot told passengers he had never seen a failure on this scale in 20 years of flying.
It’s understood officials are aware of what caused the outage but not how it disabled the system. A cyber attack was also ruled out by NATS.
Cirium reported that more than 500 flights were cancelled by mid-afternoon, with hundreds more also aborted from knock-on effects.
It follows a ‘huge failure’ of the national air traffic control system which caused chaos on the August Bank Holiday Monday.
Britain’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) said it experienced ‘technical issues’ that forced controllers to switch from an automatic system for landing and dispatching flights to a manual one.
‘Flight plans are being input manually which means we cannot process them at the same volume, hence we have applied traffic flow restrictions,’ NATS said. A spokesman told MailOnline there was ‘nothing to suggest a cyber attack’.
NATS said at 3.15pm it had ‘identified and remedied’ the technical issue affecting air traffic control systems and is working with airlines and airports to support the flights affected.
Transport Secretary Mark Harper said that despite the technical issue being resolved ‘flights are still unfortunately affected’.
He tweeted that he would ‘encourage all passengers to read the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s guidance & be aware of their rights when flights are delayed or cancelled’.
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk