Cirium leads news agenda during air traffic control crisis

At the start of one of the busiest weeks of the year for the aviation industry, disaster struck. The seven-hour National Aviation System (NATS) outage on August Bank Holiday Monday 2023, caused chaos for more than half a million UK travellers — with many flights cancelled or disrupted. The fallout was global, bringing misery for many days after the event, with travel expert, Paul Charles, calling for more stable air traffic control systems.

Having successfully positioned Cirium as the go-to brand for aviation analytics since its inception in 2019, the PC team leveraged the company’s credentials as the most trusted source of data for national news media. As a result, Cirium led the news agenda as the crisis unfolded.

The Task

Our team provided out of hours support to proactively issue data highlighting the potential impact of the outage, giving top-tier UK media stats on how many flights were scheduled to depart/arrive into UK airports during the peak summer weekend.

Thereafter, the team both proactively and reactively issued data revealing the number of cancellations from UK airports, giving the media and the wider UK public crucial updates on the sector’s state.

Throughout the week, the team also managed 50-75 media enquiries per day from outlets such as BBC News, Sky News, The Times, Financial Times, keeping key business, travel and transport correspondents up-to-date.

The Results

As a result of our work, in just two days, we secured over 2,500 pieces of coverage in the UK only, with Cirium gaining a 99.7% share of voice across the affected weekend. Coverage was featured across the front pages of newspapers and online sites, in addition to broadcast coverage.