LONDON: Flights at major British airports were disrupted on Tuesday by a technical fault at air traffic control provider NATS, the latest in a series of failures that renewed questions about the resilience of Britain’s aviation infrastructure.
The cancellation of hundreds of flights and delays to hundreds more renews scrutiny on NATS three years after a flight-plan processing failure caused even more widespread disruption.
As passengers waited for information in departure halls across the country on Tuesday, airlines questioned if the air traffic control system was fit for purpose.
NATS said that the issue, which had impacted its flight data processing system, has been resolved. It had earlier said that “safety was not compromised”.
“Recovery from today’s system issue has taken longer than we had hoped.
“Our system issue is now resolved, we are operating normally and working as hard as possible to clear the backlog of flights,” NATS said on X.
Close to a thousand flights were disrupted on Tuesday, including to and from the largest UK airport, Heathrow.
Data on flight-tracking platform FlightAware said some 490 departures were delayed at six airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol.
Some 525 arrivals at those six airports were either cancelled or delayed.
At Heathrow, 38 of 661 scheduled arrivals had been cancelled or were unable to operate, according to aviation analytics company Cirium. British Airways was the most affected carrier at the airport, cancelling 16 of 333 scheduled departures.
Air traffic control is a tightly timed system in Europe’s extremely busy skies.
Aviation analyst John Strickland said the consequences of even a relatively short outage can be severe because delays quickly cascade through tightly scheduled airline networks.
“A few hours of outage may on the face of it sound limited but the impact is enormous when a substantial number of airports across the United Kingdom are affected,” Strickland said.
Ryanair said more than 65,000 of its passengers had been affected by delays of up to eight hours and that it had cancelled more than 50 flights, calling on NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign.
“How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure Rolfe accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns?” Ryanair chief operating officer Neal McMahon said.
NATS did not respond to a request for comment on McMahon’s statement.
Wizz Air also called for reform of the air traffic controller, saying airlines, passengers and airports should not continue to bear the consequences of recurring system failures. — Reuters
