UK travellers face fresh chaos as more flights cancelled after glitch

UK travellers faced fresh travel chaos on Wednesday as more than 150 flights were scrapped nationwide, while air traffic control service scrambled to recover from a technical glitch at the National Air Traffic Services (NATS).

According to aircraft tracking platform FlightRadar24, at least 177 flights scheduled for Wednesday have been cancelled already, in addition to more than 1,300 flight cancellations to and from UK airports the previous day.

The IT malfunction on Tuesday happened three years after a flight-plan processing failure at NATS caused even more widespread disruption.

Nearly all the latest affected flights were at Britain’s busiest airport Heathrow in London, FlightRadar24 wrote on X.

NATS said it was still working to resolve disruption following a “system issue”.

“This has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover,” it said in an X post late on Tuesday.

In an earlier post, NATS apologised to frustrated passengers in departure halls across the UK and said a problem with its flight data processing system had been fixed.

“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,” it said.

Cancellations and delays

Airlines called for the resignation of Martin Rolfe, the CEO of NATS, questioned whether the UK’s air traffic control system was ⁠fit for purpose and urged the UK government to intervene.

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.

In a video posted on X, Ryanair’s Chief Operations Officer Neal McMahon said “despite promises, reports and assurances that they would fix the systems, once again NATS, under Martin Rolfe’s leadership have failed UK travellers and have failed airlines which are trying to get their passengers to and from the UK”.

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 UK are affected,” Strickland said.

Britain’s aviation regulator said it would expect NATS to share a full report on Tuesday’s system failure.

The UK Civil Aviation Authority, the country’s independent aviation regulator, said it would then consider whether any reforms are needed to ‌secure the reliability of the UK’s air traffic control system.