NATS has suffered a fresh technical problem at its Prestwick centre in Scotland, disrupting flights across Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England on Monday before engineers restored systems and began lifting air traffic restrictions. The latest incident forced delays and cancellations at several airports, including Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast, and prompted airlines to warn passengers of further knock-on effects.
The operator linked the disruption to a connectivity issue in part of its network and stressed that it was unrelated to the major software defect that paralysed UK air traffic control earlier this month. That earlier failure, now traced to a small section of code in NATS’ flight data system, led to more than 2,000 cancellations and affected hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Airlines including British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair voiced frustration over the repeated outages, with the new fault intensifying pressure on NATS over system resilience and operational continuity. The latest incident was fixed by around 10:30 local time, but disruption was still expected to ripple through the day as flight schedules were reset.