UK flights disrupted by second air traffic control outage
National Air Traffic
Services (NATS) said the problem occurred at its Prestwick control center in
Scotland and has since been resolved. The agency apologized for the disruption
and said it was coordinating with airlines and airports to limit further
impacts.
The latest incident comes
less than two weeks after a separate software problem at NATS triggered more
than 2,000 flight cancellations on September 8 and 9, affecting more than
330,000 passengers.
NATS said the Prestwick
failure was unrelated to the earlier outage.
Aviation analytics
company Cirium estimated that roughly 200 of more than 6,000 flights scheduled
to arrive in or depart from the UK had been canceled by Monday. The
cancellations represented about 1% of total operations, a level Cirium said
would normally be considered close to typical.
However, the company
warned that disruption could increase as the day progressed.
Glasgow and Belfast were
among the airports most affected, with cancellations reaching about 10 percent
of scheduled flights, according to Cirium. London’s major airports had largely
avoided the impact.
The repeated outages have
renewed attention on the resilience of Britain’s air traffic control
infrastructure as airlines and airports manage the latest disruption.
