A British military aircraft flight plan has been linked to the NATS system failure that disrupted UK air traffic on 8 September, prompting delays and cancellations at major airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester. The Ministry of Defence has rejected any suggestion of military error, while the cause remains under investigation by NATS and the UK government.
Reporting on the incident indicates that a spurious or anomalous flight plan entered into NATS’ flight-processing system triggered the outage, which took hours to restore and forced controllers to operate with reduced capacity. More than 2,000 flights were affected across the UK, renewing scrutiny of the resilience of NATS’ core systems and the absence of a dedicated backup for the affected processing function.
The disruption drew comparisons with the August 2023 NATS failure, which also involved unusual flight-plan data and caused broad knock-on effects across the network. The latest incident has prompted fresh attention from ministers and regulators as airlines assess the operational impact of repeated interruptions to the UK’s central air traffic infrastructure.