Yorkshire family stuck in south of France until Sunday after flights cancelled

Rory Dollard, 40, a cricket journalist at PA Media, said he and his wife Joanne, 40, and children Emily, 10, and Arthur, eight, of Skipton, were left waiting for five hours at Bergerac Dordogne Perigord Airport on Monday after their Ryanair flight could not take off.

After being sent to spend the night at a hotel in an industrial estate, they returned to the airport to find out about flights, but there were no staff around.

Mr Dollard said: "We hired a car at the airport and travelled to visit some friends and that's how we're spending the next few days.

"Six days, it's remarkable really, I've been to the airport again today and the flights had restarted for Ryanair, but they were all full already so it wasn't a case that we could book on to the next flight.

"We're having to wait for the next available route, which is a couple of hours' drive away at a different airport, Limoges, on Sunday afternoon.

"It feels like there's been a lack of information for passengers, really, I understand that there's a lot of people affected across the continent, it feels like the weight of people affected has overloaded the system.

"We were told we would hear from somebody the following morning and we still haven't heard from anyone and frankly we're not expecting at this stage to hear from anyone at all, I guess we'll be dealing with it once we get back to England."

Meanwhile, an “unusual piece of data” caused widespread flight disruption, an air traffic control (ATC) boss said, as airlines are under growing pressure over their treatment of passengers.

Many UK holidaymakers are stranded overseas after around 2,000 flights were cancelled because of the issue. There is speculation the ATC failure was caused by a French airline submitting a flight plan to National Air Traffic Services (Nats) in the wrong format.

Downing Street did not rule out that possibility, while Nats declined to comment on whether that was what happened. Flights to and from UK airports were restricted for several hours on Monday afternoon as the fault prevented flight plans from being processed automatically, meaning manual checks were required.