UK airports see more flight cancellations after air traffic failure
Heathrow Airport said all departures had been paused, and Gatwick Airport said the issue had affected all outbound flights across the UK
Nearly two dozen flights to and from UK airports were cancelled on Thursday, a day after technical problems with Britain’s air traffic control system caused widespread disruption across the country.
National Air Traffic Services (NATS), which provides air traffic control services for planes flying in UK airspace and the eastern part of the North Atlantic, said on Wednesday its systems were fully operational with capacity returning to normal after it switched to a back-up system.
The second outage in as many years at NATS also affected Gatwick Airport near London, Edinburgh Airport in Scotland and other locations, resulting in 122 cancellations as of 7.30pm on Wednesday, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
Transport minister Heidi Alexander said she would meet NATS’ chief executive Martin Rolfe “to understand what happened and how we can prevent reoccurrence”.
NATS is working closely with airlines and airports to clear the backlog, Alexander wrote on social media platform X. Across UK airports, 12 departures and 11 arrivals had been cancelled on Thursday as of 8.30am, according to Cirium.
Heathrow’s website showed that at least 16 flights, including departures to Brussels and Toronto and arrivals from New York and Berlin, had been cancelled on Thursday.