New air traffic control failure delays flights at UK airports

LONDON: Flights at several British airports were delayed on Monday (Sep 21) due to an air traffic control failure, Britain's NATS air traffic control provider said, less than two weeks after a separate issue halted flights across the country.

Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast airports were experiencing delays, which NATS said were related to an issue at its Prestwick centre in Scotland, while London's Gatwick and City Airports said there would be some disruption.

Airline easyJet said it had cancelled some flights, while British Airways warned its customers that they were likely to experience disruption on Monday.

NEW ISSUE BEHIND DELAYS

NATS said Monday's delays were "unrelated to the issue two weeks ago", when around 2,000 flights were cancelled due to a software defect.

"Airports south of Manchester are broadly unaffected, however, flights heading north and flights departing Scottish airports are currently subject to some delay," NATS said in a statement.

A previous outage in August 2023 cost airlines 100 million pounds (US$133.81 million) and caused travel chaos. Ryanair, Europe's biggest airline, has been calling for NATS CEO Martin Rolfe to step down.

EasyJet said Monday's disruption, which did not appear to be as severe as the failure two weeks ago that delayed hundreds of thousands of people, underlined the weakness in the air traffic operator's systems.

"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.