Britain’s air traffic control provider NATS said a failure had delayed flights at several British airports on Monday, less than two weeks after a separate issue halted flights across the country, Reuters reported.
Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast airports had delays, which NATS said were related to an issue at its Prestwick centre in Scotland. London Gatwick and London City airports said there would be some disruption.
NATS said Monday’s delays were caused by a connectivity issue “unrelated to the issue two weeks ago”. Cancellations had reached 24 by 0858 GMT. “Airports south of Manchester are broadly unaffected, however flights heading north and flights departing Scottish airports are currently subject to some delay,” a NATS statement said.
Transport Minister Heidi Alexander said the problem had now been fixed and systems were resuming. She has been considering the future of NATS Chief Executive Martin Rolfe after repeated failures. “I know this will be deeply frustrating for passengers after the previous issue,” Alexander said on X.
Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, said 25,000 of its passengers were facing delays as a result of Monday’s issue and repeated its calls for Rolfe to resign.
EasyJet said it had cancelled some flights, while British Airways warned its customers that they were likely to experience disruption on Monday. “This, once again, calls into question the resilience of NATS’ systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures,” easyJet said.
The Civil Aviation Authority said passengers were “unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident”, though it said passengers should be looked after by airlines.
Earlier disruption
The earlier incident led to about 2,000 cancellations owing to a software defect, affecting hundreds of thousands of people.
An earlier outage, in August 2023, cost airlines 100 million pounds (134 million dollars).
(Reuters)
