Jeanette Clement arrived at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday with time to spare for her flight to New York, ready to explore the city during a few days off work.
She did not get out of England.
Her flight from London, along with some 1,700 others, was canceled on Tuesday after a failure in the air-traffic control system upended operations at airports including Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest travel hubs. Tens of thousands of people were plunged into a particular circle of the traveler’s inferno: an hourslong wait for any information at all as parts of the airport shut down around them.
Stairs and elevators were taped off, and check-in counters closed. Hundreds of people watched flight boards, growing more desperate by the hour for any precious update. People missed work trips, long-awaited vacations and, at least in the case of one couple, wedding plans.
“I’ve never seen chaos like that at an airport,” said Mrs. Clement, who said that signs of problems quickly mounted at Heathrow. As more and more people piled in, Mrs. Clement sat on the floor and commiserated with other solo travelers.
Rumors and snippets of information filled the terminals, she said, as would-be passengers shared what they heard from an air-traffic controller friend or a sibling on board a stranded plane.
As the cancellations began to build, confusion also hit the baggage area, where screens appeared to be down and hundreds of people roamed from belt to belt in search of their bags. Overhead announcements blared, reminding passengers to keep their receipts for potential reimbursement.
On Wednesday, though, the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority said travelers impacted by the meltdown were “unlikely to be entitled to compensation for cancellations and delays in these circumstances.”
Mrs. Clement learned her flight was canceled, she said, when an airline employee handed her a physical letter with the news. “Quite old-fashioned, waiting for a piece of paper to come out,” she said.
A spokesman for Heathrow said on Wednesday that its operations were recovering after the air-traffic control problem. Flights were operating, the spokesman said, but the airport was expecting a chain reaction from having to move aircraft and crew.
The disruptions affected airports across Britain, causing cancellations or delays of more than 2,000 flights over the last two days, many of them at Heathrow, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.
For some stalled travelers, their ordeals seemed never-ending. Some struggled to find affordable hotel rooms near the airport, while others resorted to long bus rides or expensive cars home. As demand for rides rose, Uber prices surged.
And many passengers were diverted from Heathrow entirely, landing in unexpected cities from distant points of origin. One Malaysia Airlines flight, en route to London from Kuala Lumpur, wound up in Manchester, about 200 miles away, leaving travelers in limbo for hours, first on the tarmac and then waiting for baggage, according to Jason Leong, who was on the flight.
Eventually, passengers were told their bags would not be unloaded at all, he said and would eventually continue on to London.
Mr. Leong, a comedian, was set to perform in Birmingham on Thursday. He bought a train ticket to London rather than risk flying again.
“They will take off and land in Heathrow, and it’s chaotic there,” he said. “Who is to say it won’t glitch on us again?”
His plan is to reunite with his bags at Heathrow before boarding yet another train north to Birmingham. “I feel like the hero of a very lukewarm action movie,” he said.
Nicholas Lombardo, a software engineer living in London, had been in Barcelona with friends on a vacation when the disruption hit.
By then, he had already passed through Spanish immigration to a separate departure area for non-European Union flights. But as delays and cancellations to London were announced, airport officials decided to let him and other travelers back out so they could leave the airport.
Free of one travel dilemma, he faced another as he maneuvered to book a different flight home a day late, and the delays cut into his paid time off.
“I only have half a day left,” he said. “I don’t want to use it for this.”
Many travelers wanted not only to reach their destinations but to find answers about what happened. “Is it just someone sat on a button? Is it some neglect on the side of the people maintaining these systems?” Mrs. Clement asked. “How has this been able to happen?”
National Air Traffic Services, the company providing most of Britain’s air-traffic control, said on Wednesday that it would investigate the disruptions fully. Earlier, the company had said that the problem was in a flight-processing system, and its chief executive, Martin Rolfe, apologized for the mess. He told the BBC that NATS did not believe this was a cyberattack.
Mrs. Clement said that her airline, Virgin Atlantic, had offered to rebook her flight to New York City a day later, Wednesday evening. But in the end, she decided the shortened trip wasn’t worth the trouble and canceled.
“It is a little bit miserable just sitting at home, thinking you could have been in New York,” she said. But, she added, she couldn’t face going back to the airport again.
Ceylan Yeğinsu contributed reporting.
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