UK air traffic control fault delays flights at several airports

London, United Kingdom. Flights at several British airports were delayed on Monday after a connectivity issue at air traffic control provider NATS’ Prestwick centre in Scotland. The issue was resolved and systems were resuming, Transport Minister Heidi Alexander said.

Airport disruption

Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast airports experienced delays linked to the problem, while London Gatwick and London City airports said some disruption was expected.

NATS said airports south of Manchester were broadly unaffected, but flights heading north and departures from Scottish airports were subject to delays.

Airline response

Ryanair said 25,000 of its passengers faced delays because of the issue and repeated its call for NATS Chief Executive Martin Rolfe to resign.

easyJet said it had cancelled some flights, while British Airways warned customers they were likely to face disruption on Monday. By 0858 GMT, 24 flights had been cancelled.

Previous failures

NATS said the connectivity issue was unrelated to a software defect two weeks earlier that led to the cancellation of about 2,000 flights and affected hundreds of thousands of people.

Alexander said she understood passengers would find the latest disruption deeply frustrating following the previous incident.

A separate outage in August 2023 cost airlines £100 million ($134 million) and caused widespread travel disruption. easyJet said Monday’s incident raised further concerns about the resilience of NATS’ systems and called for firm action to prevent repeated failures.