National Air Traffic Services (NATS) triggered another round of disruption on Monday after a technical issue at its Prestwick centre in Scotland led to traffic restrictions and delays at airports including Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast. The fault also rippled across parts of northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, forcing airlines to manage cancellations and late departures while engineers worked to restore normal operations.
The latest problem emerged less than two weeks after a far larger UK air traffic control outage that cancelled more than 2,000 flights and prompted fresh scrutiny of system resilience. NATS treated the Prestwick disruption as a separate incident from the earlier failure, which it has linked to a software defect in its flight data system. In the new case, traffic regulations were imposed while engineers investigated to keep operations safe.
London-area airports were less affected than those further north, while departures from Scottish airports and flights heading north bore the brunt of the delays. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander also commented publicly as the disruption spread through the day, underlining the pressure on the UK’s short-haul network after two close-together ATC incidents.