On Tuesday, over 1,000 flights were cancelled across Britain following a significant technical issue with the air traffic control system. The disruption left more than 65,000 passengers stranded for hours, both at airports and on aircraft. Authorities are currently investigating the cause of the failure and working to restore normal operations.
NATS Resolves Technical Issue Affecting Air Traffic Control
The National Air Traffic Services (NATS), responsible for managing air traffic control in the UK, confirmed that it has resolved a technical issue with its flight-processing system. Engineers worked to restore normal operations following the identification of the problem.
NATS later announced that the system is now functioning normally and that efforts are underway to address the backlog of flights that accumulated during the disruption.
Ryanair said over 65,000 passengers had been affected. The airline cancelled more than 50 scheduled flights, as per AP. British Airways said it had been forced to cancel or divert more than 100 flights.
NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe defended the organisation as being “fit for purpose”, while acknowledging the scale of the backlog of aircraft and passengers, according to the BBC. A British Airways spokesperson said the scale of the disruption would have a “significant knock-on impact”, adding that the incident was outside the airline’s control and had left aircraft and crews in the wrong locations. EasyJet also said some of its flights were unable to operate and that the system failure had caused delays across Europe, as per Reuters. Heathrow said that delays would continue as airlines worked through the backlog.
Some travellers faced delays of up to eight hours.
Manchester Airport said it expected to operate a full schedule on Wednesday, although it added that the airport could be busier than usual as cancelled and delayed flights were rescheduled.
