Air traffic failure was avoidable, says transport secretary

But Alexander said she has also asked the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to conduct an independent review and present an update in six months' time.Airlines UK, which represents the country's carriers, said it had written to Alexander to "register serious concerns over yesterday's technical failure at Nats – the third major system failure in three years – which has caused major disruption across the UK's aviation network".Airlines UK chief Tim….

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.Nats is a public-private partnership, with the government holding the controlling stake.

The rest is split between a group of UK airlines including BA, easyJet and Virgin Atlantic as well as Heathrow and Nats staff.Nats first confirmed it was investigating a "technical issue" at 13:46 BST on Tuesday, "which is causing some disruption to flight departures".The glitch occurred at Nats' Swanwick Centre in Hampshire, where one of its two air traffic control centres are.

The other is in Prestwick, Ayrshire.Around 90 minutes later, it said it had identified that the issue was with its flight processing system.This processes flight plans and other operational information used by controllers to manage air traffic.It continually updates flight information as aircraft progress through UK airspace, helping controllers maintain a safe and orderly flow of traffic.By 19:30, Nats said the system issue had been resolved and it was working….

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, though Bristol, Belfast and Luton said there continued to be knock-on effects.Sasha and James from south London were due to fly to Madeira for their honeymoon yesterday afternoon when their flight was cancelled.After getting married at the weekend,….

Heidi Alexander orders an investigation into the glitch that caused more than 2,000 flight cancellations.