Flights at major UK airports were disrupted on Tuesday after air traffic control provider NATS suffered a technical fault, leading to hundreds of cancellations and delays and renewed concerns over the resilience of the country’s aviation infrastructure, Reuters reported.
NATS said its flight data processing system had experienced an issue which was resolved at 7.34pm BST, adding that it was operating normally and working to clear the backlog of flights. It said safety had not been compromised.
The disruption affected airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted, with close to 1,000 flights disrupted during the day.
Flight-tracking data showed around 490 departures were delayed across six airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol, while about 525 arrivals were either cancelled or delayed.
Heathrow said arrivals had been suspended for the remainder of Tuesday, while departures had resumed. The airport warned that disruption was expected to continue.
At Heathrow, 38 of 661 scheduled arrivals had been cancelled or were unable to operate, while British Airways was among the most affected carriers, cancelling 16 of its 333 scheduled departures.
British Airways said the severity of the disruption would have a significant knock-on impact on passengers and staff.
Ryanair said around 150,000 of its passengers had been affected by delays of up to eight hours and that it had cancelled more than 200 flights. It called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign, while Wizz Air urged urgent reform of the air traffic control provider.
NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe said the provider had yet to determine exactly what caused the technical failure.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority said it expected NATS to provide a full report on the incident before considering whether further measures were needed to improve the reliability of the country’s air traffic control system.
The latest disruption comes three years after a flight-plan processing failure caused widespread chaos across UK airports, with airline bosses later estimating the outage cost them more than £100 million in refunds and compensation.
