Flights across the UK were grounded and dozens cancelled after a major air traffic control failure caused widespread chaos at the peak of the summer holiday period.
Nats, the UK’s air traffic controller, said it experienced a “technical issue” at its Swanwick headquarters which affected its ability to handle flights across the UK.
Operations were suspended from mid-afternoon at Heathrow, Gatwick, Edinburgh and Manchester airports. At least 45 departures and 35 arrivals were cancelled across the UK.
The issue affected the London Area Control Centre which is responsible for airspace south of Newcastle. It extends into the North Sea and the Atlantic off the coast of Cornwall.
The outage affected the airspace above 24,500ft, meaning all international flights were affected.
The number of aircraft that could fly over England and Wales was restricted and limits on traffic remained even after systems were restored. Planes preparing for take-off were stuck on the tarmac for several hours while holidaymakers returning to the UK were left in limbo awaiting news of their flights.
Dozens of flights were grounded at Heathrow — Britain’s busiest airport
FLIGHT RADAR
Senior aviation sources said the situation had caused “chaos with no one able to fully gauge the knock-on effect”.
Airlines were scrambling to restore their schedules on Wednesday evening but were braced for further cancellations. More than a dozen flights were diverted to European airports. Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, was forced to limit arrivals and departures until 7.30pm.
Sources at Nats said the system was only down for about 20 minutes. Even a brief failure has a huge impact over the busy summer period, with airlines predicting “many hours” of disruption.
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British Airways said: “Like all airlines, we are dealing with the impact of an air traffic control issue that is affecting the vast majority of our flights.
“Whilst this is entirely outside of our control, we want to apologise to our customers for any inconvenience and assure them that our teams are working hard to get their journeys back on track as quickly as possible.”
Heathrow is the UK’s busiest airport
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE TIMES
Airline bosses will be furious that another air traffic control failure has affected schedules. Thousands of flights were cancelled on the August bank holiday in 2023 when the entire Nats system collapsed when a rogue flight plan caused the system to shut down as a precaution. That meant that instead of rejecting the erroneous plan, the system kept tripping, resulting in more than 2,000 flight cancellations and 700,000 stranded passengers.
Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, called on Martin Rolfe, the Nats chief executive, to resign after the latest meltdown, claiming “no lessons have been learnt” since the 2023 system outage.
Neal McMahon, Ryanair’s chief operating officer, said: “It is outrageous that passengers are once again being hit with delays and disruption due to Martin Rolfe’s continued mismanagement of Nats.
“Yet another ATC system failure has resulted in the closure of UK airspace meaning thousands of passengers’ travel plans have been disrupted. It is clear that no lessons have been learnt since the 2023 Nats system outage, and passengers continue to suffer as a result of Martin Rolfe’s incompetence.”
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David Morgan, easyJet’s chief operating officer, said: “It’s extremely disappointing to see an ATC failure once again causing disruption to our customers at this busy and important time of year for travel. While our priority today is supporting our customers, we will want to understand from NATS what steps they are taking to ensure issues don’t continue.”
Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: “It is utterly unacceptable that after a major disruption just two years ago, air traffic control has once again been hit by a technical fault.
“With thousands of families preparing to go on a well-earned break, this just isn’t good enough. The government should launch an urgent investigation to ensure the system is fit for purpose, including ruling out hostile action as a cause. The public deserve to have full confidence in such a vital piece of national infrastructure.”
Nats said: “Our engineers have now restored the system that was affected this afternoon. We are in the process of resuming normal operations in the London area. We continue to work closely with airline and airport customers to minimise disruption. We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.”
The latest air traffic control meltdown will put pressure on Nats to explain why its systems are so susceptible to failure.
An inquiry into the August 2023 failure, which was commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), highlighted a litany of errors at Nats, including: engineers working from home; computer systems that were inaccessible because passwords could not be verified; inadequate communication of the failure to airlines and airports; and a lack of mitigations to prevent a system shutdown.
Questions will now be raised over what went wrong on Wednesday afternoon and why back-up systems were not able to prevent the suspension of airport operations.
Gatwick airport was also hit by delays and cancellations as air traffic systems went down
AMER GHAZZAL/ALAMY
Ryanair has been demanding the resignation of Nats since the 2023 incident. Bosses at other airlines have been more muted in their public criticism, but privately were said to be seething about that failure and will be deeply unimpressed by the latest meltdown.
Airlines were left to foot the bill in 2023 and it will be the same this time. While passengers are not entitled to compensation, because the delays fall outside the airline’s control, the carrier must still provide food and, if the delay is overnight, accommodation.
The timing of Wednesday’s failure, at the beginning of the peak school holiday period, could not be much worse. The systems may only have been down for 20 minutes but the knock-on was set to last hours. The questions about how it was able to happen will probably last days, if not weeks.
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Sir Keir Starmer said on Wednesday that he would do “whatever it takes” to ensure the biggest expansion of Britain’s airports for half a century in a bid to galvanise the country’s economy.
Heathrow is preparing to unveil plans for a third runway. The government is also expected to formally approve plans for a second runway at Gatwick in coming weeks and is pressing ahead with the biggest overhaul of Britain’s airspace since its creation to enable quicker flights and fewer delays.