Flights at major British airports have been disrupted by a technical fault at air traffic control provider NATS, the latest in a series of failures that renewed questions about the resilience of Britain’s aviation infrastructure.
The cancellation of hundreds of flights and delays to hundreds more renews scrutiny of NATS three years after a flight-plan processing failure caused even more widespread disruption.
As passengers waited for information in departure halls across the country on Tuesday, airlines questioned whether the country’s air traffic control system was fit for purpose.
NATS said at 1834 GMT (4:34am AEST Wednesday) the issue, which had impacted its flight data processing system, had been resolved. It had earlier said that “safety was not compromised”.
“Recovery from today’s system issue has taken longer than we had hoped. Our system issue is now resolved, we are operating normally and working as hard as possible to clear the backlog of flights,” NATS said on X.
The traffic control provider later said in an update that it would take time to recover from the disruption, adding that “this has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network”.
CEO Martin Rolfe told Sky News that NATS hadn’t “fully done the investigation” to find the reason behind the technical issue that caused the disruption.
“We don’t have an idea yet of exactly what went wrong,” Rolfe said.
Close to a thousand flights were disrupted, including to and from the largest UK airport, Heathrow.
Heathrow said arrivals to the airport had been suspended for the remainder of Tuesday, and while departures had resumed, the disruption was expected to continue.
Data on flight-tracking platform FlightAware said some 490 departures were delayed at six airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol as of 1518 GMT (1:18am AEST Wednesday).
Some 525 arrivals at those six airports were either cancelled or delayed, the website data shows.
At Heathrow, 38 of 661 scheduled arrivals had been cancelled or were unable to operate, according to aviation analytics company Cirium. British Airways was the most affected carrier at the airport, cancelling 16 of 333 scheduled departures.
“The severity of the issue means there will be a significant knock-on impact for customers and colleagues,” British Airways said in a statement.
Britain’s aviation regulator said it would expect NATS to share a full report of the incident.
with AP
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