Aircraft charter specialist, Air Charter Service, has said that, in the wake of the global IT problem last Friday (19^th July), which caused thousands of flight cancellations, the private aircraft charter market saw an increase of more than 10% compared to the same date last year, as people turned to alternative means of travel.

On what was predicted to be the busiest day for flights from UK airports since before the pandemic, a huge Microsoft outage saw computer systems around the world crashing, leading to the cancellation of thousands of commercial flights globally. Determined not to have their planned holidays delayed, meetings missed, and connections made, some people chose to look for immediate alternatives.

Joe Gallimore, Director at ACS, commented: “Figures from flight data analysis specialist, WingX, show more than a 10% increase in private flights from Europe and the US on Friday, compared to the same day last year, which is significantly ahead of the year on year figures for July so far.

“We had a real surge of activity on Friday, with bookings even still coming in on Sunday. Our US offices, in particular, were extremely busy, with our Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Washington offices all booking multiple flights for clients that either didn’t want to miss out on their holidays, or had to be at an all-important meeting that day.

“One small group of passengers were just trying to get home from Georgia to Michigan and we had booked a charter for them within an hour of them calling in. Another client had missed their connecting flight to the Caribbean, whilst another had a flight on Sunday that they couldn’t afford to be cancelled, and so chose to book with us to be on the safe side.”