Airlines have demanded immediate action after a fresh air traffic control failure triggered widespread delays across the UK, disrupting more than 140 Ryanair flights.
National Air Traffic Services (NATS) said the incident affected flights in Northern Ireland, Scotland and northern England.
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The organisation stressed that the problem was separate from the software fault at NATS on 8 September, when more than 2,000 flights were cancelled and hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected.
Airports in Belfast, Edinburgh and Manchester reported delays and advised travellers to contact their airlines for the latest updates.
A NATS spokesperson said Monday’s disruption stemmed from a “connectivity issue” at its Prestwick centre in Scotland. The problem has since been resolved.
Ryanair and other airlines have already called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign following the flight chaos earlier this month.
Flights departing from Edinburgh were among those affected
Ryanair said more than 25,000 passengers were expected to face disruption, while more than 140 of its flights had been delayed.
Neal McMahon, the airline’s chief operations officer, said: “Martin Rolfe has presided over repeated system failures, repeated passenger disruption and repeated failures to deliver an effective back-up system.
“Enough is enough.
“Martin Rolfe should resign today.”
EasyJet said the latest disruption “calls into question the resilience of NATS’ systems”, while Jet2 said both customers and airlines now required “action, accountability and proper resilience”.
“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.
“We will do all we can to minimise the impact of this for our customers and advise anyone due to fly today to check our flight tracker for the latest information.”
Passengers faced delays and cancellations after the latest failure
Jet2 chief executive Steve Heapy said: “This morning’s disruption comes days after NATS published a report into its latest major failure and it is simply not good enough for this critical national infrastructure to keep letting customers down.
“There have been too many incidents, too many reports and too many promises of lessons being learned.
“What customers and airlines need now is action, accountability and proper resilience, and we need it urgently.”
Tim Alderslade, chief executive of industry body Airlines UK, said passengers and airlines “deserve better”.
He said: “Yet another NATS failure is causing delays and disruption for passengers and airlines alike, and comes just days after its report into the most recent major outage” and called for “these failures [to] stop happening”.
British Airways described the latest disruption as “disappointing”, saying some customers could be affected by “yet another technical fault with NATS”.
NATS said airports south of Manchester had been “broadly unaffected”, although flights travelling north and those departing from Scottish airports were experiencing some delays.
“Passengers should check with their airlines. This is unrelated to the issue two weeks ago. We apologise for the disruption,” it added.
NATS said airports south of Manchester, pictured, were ‘broadly unaffected’
UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said in a post on X that engineers had “fixed the problem and systems are resuming”, while warning that some delays could continue as the system reset.
A NATS spokesperson said: “The issue in our Prestwick centre is now fixed.
“We are working with airports and airlines to safely lift air traffic regulations as quickly as we can to minimise any further disruption.
“Passengers should still check the status of their flight with their airline. We apologise for the disruption.”
An initial NATS report into the 8 September flight chaos said the disruption was caused by a software defect rather than “any incorrect actions”.
The fault occurred in “the space of a millisecond”, according to the report.
Last July, a “radar-related issue” caused an air traffic control failure that disrupted thousands of passengers and led to the cancellation of more than 160 flights.
In August 2023, more than 700,000 passengers were affected when flights were grounded at UK airports after NATS suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.
NATS is the UK’s leading provider of air traffic control services and manages about 2.5m flights each year.
