NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe said organisation had not yet completed its investigation into what caused latest failure and that they have no “idea of exactly what went wrong”.
More than 1,000 flights were cancelled across the United Kingdom on Tuesday after a technical problem at the country’s air traffic control provider NATS triggered widespread disruption at major airports.
Nearly 1,300 flights to and from British airports had been cancelled, according to aircraft tracking platform FlightRadar24.
Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Edinburgh were among the airports affected, with Dublin Airport in neighbouring Ireland also reporting dozens of cancellations.
System Issue Now Resolved: NATS
NATS said the fault had affected its flight data processing system. By early evening, the air traffic control provider said the problem had been fixed but warned that clearing the backlog would take time.
“Recovery from today’s system issue has taken longer than we had hoped,” Britain’s air traffic control service, known as NATS, said on X early evening.
“Our system issue is now resolved, we are operating normally and working as hard as possible to clear the backlog of flights,” it noted, adding “this is hugely frustrating and apologise unreservedly”.
Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, said arrivals had been suspended for the remainder of Tuesday, while departures resumed amid continuing disruption. Airlines were forced to cancel, delay or divert flights as aircraft and crew were left out of position.
British Airways, Air India Impacted
British Airways cancelled or diverted more than 100 flights, affecting tens of thousands of passengers. Ryanair said more than 65,000 of its customers had been disrupted and that it had cancelled more than 50 flights.
According to FlightRadar24, 177 flights have been cancelled so far on Wednesday in London.
Air India also warned that the disruption could affect some of its services, as aircraft and crew were displaced following the incident. The airline advised passengers to check their flight status before heading to the airport.
Meanwhile, easyJet had 218 of its flights cancelled, KLM 37, Eurowings 22 and Ryanair reported 41 cancelled flights.
Arsenal’s Flight Delayed
The disruption also affected Arsenal, whose Champions League squad was due to travel to Naples for Wednesday’s match against Napoli. The team had to cancel a planned press conference after its flight was delayed.
Britain’s Aviation Infrastructure Comes Under Scrutiny
The latest incident has renewed scrutiny of the resilience of Britain’s aviation infrastructure. It comes after a radar-related technical problem in July last year disrupted flights for more than four hours at major UK airports.
Britain’s air traffic control system suffered an even bigger failure in 2023, when a problem with automatic flight-plan processing caused hundreds of cancellations and delays, affecting more than 700,000 passengers.
Ryanair COO Calls For Sacking Of NATS Chief Executive
The latest outage has prompted renewed calls for action from airlines. Ryanair COO Neal McMahon called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to be removed, while Wizz Air demanded urgent reform of the air traffic control provider.
“Enough is enough, it’s time for the UK government to intervene… and put somebody in charge who can do the job,” McMahon said.
Ryanair stated that nearly 1,50,000 of its passengers have been affected because of delays in flights and that they had to cancel more than 200 flights.
“How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe, accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns?” he asked.
