More flight cancellations as fallout from air traffic control glitch continues

It promised an investigation into what is its third major technical fault in three years.The government said Nats' boss has its confidence though Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said the outage was "unacceptable".Martin Rolfe, who has led Nats for 11 years, met with Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander on Wednesday morning where she "significant concerns" about the widespread disruption.Downing Street said Nats – which is 49% owned by the government – must….

Traffic then resumed, before facing further disruption in the afternoon.A Heathrow spokesperson said on Wednesday its "operations are recovering"."Flights are operating today but we are expecting knock-on impacts as aircraft and crew reposition."At Gatwick, a spokesperson said: "Flights have now resumed from London Gatwick.

However, we still anticipate that it will take time for our operations to fully return to normal."Manchester, Luton, Stansted, Bristol, and Belfast City Airports all said on Wednesday that flights had resumed.

Although Bristol, Belfast and Luton said there continued to be knock-on effects.What are my rights if my flight is cancelled or delayed?It is not the first time disruption has blighted Nats' control system.

In 2023, a computer shutdown over the August bank holiday weekend caused chaos for 700,000 passengers.It took an engineer, who had been unable to correct the fault from home, three hours to get to work.There was another, smaller Nats outage in 2025, which caused 150 cancellations.Ryanair and Wizz Air have called for an overhaul of Nats, with Wizz Air saying it was "not fit for purpose" in its current form.Yvonne….

The rest is split between a group of UK airlines including BA, easyJet and Virgin Atlantic as well as Heathrow and Nats staff.Rolfe said that despite the current situation, the UK generally had a very good air traffic system."Not to take away any of the frustrations and disappointment from people who haven't been able to travel, but we do have one of the best systems and one of the best….

He said it was not the same system that failed during the incident in 2023.Although the technical issue affected departures, arrivals were also hit as space on the ground became increasingly restricted.Additional reporting by Emer Moreau, Faarea Masud and Nick WattHave your travel plans been disrupted?

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Departures from a number of airports are affected by a technical problem affecting air traffic control provider Nats.