The Ministry of Defence has denied a report that a military aircraft was to blame for an air traffic control system failure that caused widespread travel chaos earlier this week.<\/p>\n
A flight plan submitted by a British military aircraft caused the outage, which led to the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights, the Financial Times reported on Friday, external<\/a>, citing sources familiar with the incident.<\/p>\n The data entry caused a glitch in the system operated by National Air Traffic Services (Nats) on Tuesday, which took hours to restart, according to the newspaper.<\/p>\n A Ministry of Defence (MoD) spokesperson said: “We do not believe there’s any indication of an error on the part of the military.<\/p>\n “Because it’s subject to a live Nats investigation, which is expected to conclude next week, it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further while that investigation is ongoing.”<\/p>\n A spokesperson for Nats – in which the government has a controlling interest – said it was still investigating the cause of the glitch and that it “would be wrong to speculate while that work continues”.<\/p>\n Hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have been affected across two days of end-of-summer travel chaos after the system went down for four hours on Tuesday.<\/p>\n Flights in and out of the UK’s main airports were affected, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Glasgow.<\/p>\n While Nats is expected to report back on its own investigation on Wednesday, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has also ordered an independent probe by the Civil Aviation Authority.<\/p>\n