Thousands of passengers face days of disruption after a technical failure at the UK’s air traffic control provider caused almost 2,000 flights to be cancelled.
Thousands of airline passengers face days of disruption after a failure in the UK’s air traffic control system grounded flights across the country.
More than 1,900 flights to and from British airports had been cancelled by Wednesday (09.09.26) morning, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium, with hundreds more delayed.
The disruption is expected to continue for several days because aircraft, crews and passengers have been left in the wrong locations following Tuesday’s (08.09.26) widespread cancellations.
National Air Traffic Services (Nats) identified a problem with its “flight processing system” at around 1pm on Tuesday.
The issue was not fully resolved until about 7pm.
With the system unavailable, flights at major airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester were diverted, cancelled or severely delayed.
London City, Stansted, East Midlands, Birmingham and Belfast City airports were also affected.
At Heathrow, Europe’s second-busiest airport, flights were grounded for hours, while Gatwick temporarily halted inbound and outbound services.
Ryanair said up to 150,000 of its passengers had been affected by delays or cancellations involving more than 200 flights. British Airways cancelled or diverted more than 100 flights and warned disruption would continue into Wednesday.
EasyJet also said some flights were “unable to operate” because of the failure, causing delays across Europe.
Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe apologised and said engineers did not yet know the precise cause of the “technical issue”.
A Nats spokesperson said: “We are truly sorry for the ongoing flight disruption.”
The incident is not currently being treated as a cyber-security attack by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre.
The failure has renewed pressure on Rolfe, who was also in charge during a major Nats IT outage in 2023 that grounded more than 2,000 flights and affected around 700,000 passengers.
Ryanair and Wizz Air have called for his resignation.
Ryanair chief operations officer Neal McMahon accused Rolfe of “repeated mismanagement”.
Rolfe said he accepted “full responsibility” for Tuesday’s disruption and had apologised “unreservedly”.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander is due to update MPs on the incident after speaking with Rolfe.
She said it would take time for flights to return to normal and called for assurances that lessons would be learned.
The Civil Aviation Authority has requested a full report from Nats before deciding whether further action is required.
Aviation consultant John Strickland questioned whether sufficient backup systems were available following the 2023 outage.
For affected passengers, compensation may also be difficult to obtain.
Rory Boland, editor of Which? Travel, said technical failures of this kind are generally considered an “extraordinary circumstance”, meaning airlines may not have to pay compensation even when flights are cancelled or delayed.
Passengers set for days of disruption as air traffic control glitch grounds flights across UK
