More than 625 flights to and from UK airports were cancelled on Tuesday after a technical failure at National Air Traffic Services (NATS) disrupted air traffic control operations across the country, leaving thousands of passengers stranded and triggering widespread delays.
The disruption began around 3pm after NATS identified a problem with its flight data processing system. Major airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, London City, Manchester, Birmingham and airports across Scotland, were affected as airlines struggled to operate scheduled services.
By Tuesday evening, flight-tracking platform Flightradar24 reported that at least 625 flights had been cancelled, including about 218 easyJet services and more than 130 British Airways flights. Other affected carriers included Ryanair, KLM and Lufthansa.
NATS later said the technical fault had been resolved and that its system was operating normally, but warned that recovering from the disruption would take time as airlines and airports worked through a significant backlog.
“Recovery from today’s system issue has taken longer than we had hoped,” NATS said, adding that the incident had created difficulties across the wider aviation network.
NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe said the organisation had not yet completed its investigation into the cause of the failure. He told Sky News that it was still unclear exactly what had gone wrong.
The technical failure resulted in significant disruption for passengers, with some flights delayed for hours and others cancelled after aircraft had already departed or were waiting on the ground. A British Airways service from London Heathrow to Shanghai, for example, was forced to turn back and eventually landed at Cardiff after spending more than five hours in the air.
British Airways said it had been forced to cancel or divert more than 100 flights, affecting tens of thousands of passengers, while warning of significant knock-on effects as aircraft and crew were left out of position.
The airline advised passengers whose flights had been cancelled not to travel to the airport and instead make changes to their bookings online. EasyJet and Ryanair also urged customers to check their respective websites for the latest flight information.
Ryanair said more than 150,000 of its passengers had been affected by delays of up to eight hours and that it had cancelled more than 200 flights. The airline called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign, citing repeated failures within the air traffic control system.
Wizz Air also called for urgent reforms, arguing that airlines, airports and passengers should not continue to bear the consequences of recurring technical failures.
The disruption has renewed scrutiny of NATS, coming three years after a separate failure in its flight-plan processing system caused widespread disruption across the UK and left thousands of passengers affected.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said she was pleased that the NATS system had been restored but acknowledged that it would take time for normal operations to resume.
She said she was seeking assurances that lessons would be learned from the latest incident and that the systems supporting the UK’s aviation network were sufficiently reliable.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority said it expects NATS to provide a full report on the incident before determining whether further measures are required to strengthen the reliability of the country’s air traffic control system.
Although the immediate technical fault has been resolved, airports and airlines continue to work through the resulting backlog, with passengers advised to confirm their flight status before travelling to the airport.
