Airlines urge action after UK flights delayed and cancelled again

Nats says fault at Prestwick has been ‘fixed’ after airports in Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland are hit

Airlines have called for “action and accountability” over the UK’s air traffic control services after another technical issue led to flights being disrupted for the second time in a fortnight.

Dozens of flights were cancelled and others severely delayed after a fault occurred on Monday morning at National Air Traffic Services (Nats), this time at its second control centre, at Prestwick in Scotland .

The fault, predominantly affecting Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England, was fixed by about 10.30am, but only after airlines including British Airways and easyJet were forced into making cancellations.

A Nats spokesperson said it had been “working with airports and airlines to safely lift air traffic regulations as quickly as we can to minimise any further disruption”, and apologised for the disruption. They said the problem was “unrelated to the issue two weeks ago.”

Despite the relatively quick fix, at least 200 flights in and out of UK airports were set to be cancelled by the end of Monday, according to the analysts Cirium.

The transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, posted on X just after 10.30am, notifying that the latest technical issue was resolved. She added:

“I know this will be deeply frustrating for passengers after the previous issue. There may be some delays as things reset.”

The incident came less than two weeks after a serious problems at the Nats control centre in England disrupted travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers, and only three days after the release of an initial report by Nats promising to “continually improve the critical service we provide”.

Nats said Monday’s incident had been caused by a “connectivity issue” at its Prestwick centre.

Among the stranded passengers at Glasgow were a bride and groom due to be flying to their Las Vegas wedding with family and friends. Their BA flight to Heathrow was cancelled, meaning they would miss their connection to the US on Monday, and they rebooked for Tuesday.

The bride-to-be Barbara, Ann Stoddart, said: “I’m completely stressed out. I have still to go to the county court in Vegas to go and get the marriage licence, and I’ve got to be there three days in advance … If there’s any hiccups I might not be getting married on Saturday now.”

Airlines called for action to address repeated failures, with Ryanair reiterating its calls for the Nats chief executive, Martin Rolfe, to resign.

EasyJet, one of the most-affected airlines on Monday, said the latest flight disruption “once again calls into question the resilience of Nats’s systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures”.

BA described it as “yet another technical fault with Nats” and “disappointing”.

The Jet2 chief executive, Steve Heapy, said it was “simply not good enough for this critical national infrastructure to keep letting customers down”, adding: “What customers and airlines need now is action, accountability and proper resilience, and we need it urgently.”

The Ryanair chief operations officer, Neal McMahon, added: “Just three days after Nats assured airlines and passengers that it had introduced robust ‘mitigation plans’, its flight data processing system has failed again.

“More than 25,000 Ryanair passengers have already suffered disruption, with more than 140 Ryanair flights delayed.”

Rolfe, who earned £1.4m last year including bonuses, has come under increasing pressure since the major outage on 8 September, the third high-profile incident in just over three years. Rolfe apologised and said he took “full responsibility”, but Nats has also denied that the incidents are related.

In July 2005 a “radar-related issue” caused an air traffic control failure that disrupted thousands of passengers and forced the cancellation of more than 160 flights.

In the biggest incident, in August 2023, more than 700,000 passengers had their travel disrupted when flights were grounded across the UK after a “rogue flight plan” sparked a system failure.

Alexander has commissioned the CAA to conduct an independent review of Nats and check the findings of its initial report into the 8 September breakdown. She said the government still needed “to urgently understand why this issue was not discovered and fixed before it caused chaos”.