A technical fault at the UK air traffic control provider NATS caused significant disruptions to flights at major British airports on Tuesday, leading to the cancellation of hundreds of flights and delays for many more. This incident has reignited concerns regarding the reliability of the UK’s aviation infrastructure, as reported by Gulf Times.
The issue, which affected NATS’s flight data processing system, was reported to have been resolved by 1934 BST (1834 GMT). NATS stated that safety was not compromised during the incident, but acknowledged that recovery from the disruption took longer than anticipated. The company is now focused on clearing the backlog of flights.
On Tuesday, nearly a thousand flights were impacted, particularly at Heathrow, the UK’s largest airport. By 2119 BST, arrivals at Heathrow were suspended for the remainder of the day, although departures had resumed. Data from flight-tracking platform FlightAware indicated that around 490 departures were delayed across six airports, including Gatwick and London City.
According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, approximately 525 arrivals at these airports were either cancelled or delayed. British Airways was notably affected, cancelling 16 of its 333 scheduled departures. The airline expressed concern over the significant impact of the disruption on both customers and staff.
Aviation analyst John Strickland noted that even a brief outage in Europe’s busy air traffic control system can have severe cascading effects on flight schedules. Ryanair reported that around 150,000 passengers experienced delays of up to eight hours, resulting in over 200 flight cancellations. The airline’s Chief Operating Officer called for the resignation of NATS CEO Martin Rolfe, citing repeated failures in management.
Wizz Air also demanded urgent reforms, arguing that the current state of NATS is inadequate for a critical national infrastructure provider. The UK Civil Aviation Authority has stated it expects NATS to provide a full report on the incident, which will be reviewed to determine if further actions are necessary to enhance the reliability of the air traffic control system.
This incident follows a similar outage last year that cost airlines over £100 million ($135.49 million) in refunds and compensation. The Civil Aviation Authority had previously urged NATS to reassess its contingency plans for outages after a malfunction in the automatic processing of flight plans caused widespread chaos.
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