A system failure at NATS, the UK’s air traffic control provider, disrupted flights across the country on Tuesday, with Air India among the international carriers affected.
More than 1,000 flights were cancelled across the UK on Tuesday, with a further 177 flights cancelled for Wednesday as the network worked through the backlog.
Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol all reported disrupted operations, with Heathrow the hardest hit.
Air India said the outage forced it to divert, delay or cancel multiple flights scheduled to and from UK airports.
NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe said the exact cause of the technical failure remained under investigation.
Passengers travelling to and from the UK were advised to check their flight status directly with airlines given the scale and unpredictability of the disruption.
NATS, formerly known as National Air Traffic Services, is the primary air traffic control provider for UK airspace, handling flight data processing for arrivals and departures across the country’s busiest airports.
September is a peak month for Indian student travel to the UK, meaning the timing of the outage was particularly disruptive for passengers flying to British universities for the new academic term.
NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe said the exact cause of the technical failure was still being investigated, though the system was confirmed to be operating normally again after the fix.
The Civil Aviation Authority was expected to seek a detailed report from NATS on the incident, given the scale of disruption it caused across the network.
Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol airports all reported disrupted flight operations during the outage, with Heathrow the most severely affected.
NATS said recovery from the backlog across the aviation network would take time even after the underlying technical issue was resolved.
This is not the first time a NATS technical failure has caused mass disruption to UK air travel, with similar system outages having grounded flights in the past.
London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, Wikimedia Commons, CC0
