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Second Air Traffic Failure in Two Weeks Delays More Flights
— 3 mins read
NATS says Monday's fault at its Prestwick centre is unrelated to the software defect that grounded 2,000 flights on 8 September.
Flights across Scotland and northern England were delayed this morning after a technical issue at the National Air Traffic Services centre at Prestwick, the second failure to disrupt UK airspace in a fortnight.
NATS said its engineers were investigating the problem, and that flights heading north, along with departures from Scottish airports, were subject to delay. Airports south of Manchester were largely unaffected.
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Belfast International, Dundee, Inverness and Islay all reported delays. Ryanair reported disruption to flights between the UK and Ireland, and Etihad warned passengers of delays to its UK services. Sky News carried live updates through this morning.
The Prestwick centre handles airspace over Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland, as well as the oceanic sectors used by transatlantic traffic between North America and northern Europe, which meant the effects extended beyond domestic routes. Aviation industry reporting identified the fault as a failure of the flight data processing system at the centre.
Not connected to the earlier failure, NATS says
NATS said the fault was not related to the failure of 8 September, which led to around 2,000 cancellations and disrupted hundreds of thousands of journeys. The two incidents involved different systems: the earlier failure was traced to the National Airspace System, while Monday's affected flight data processing at Prestwick.
The company published its preliminary findings on that earlier incident on Friday, three days before Monday's disruption. It attributed the failure to a software defect in a small subsection of coding, said mitigation was in place while a permanent fix was tested, and ruled out both a cyber attack and sabotage.
Airline criticism
Airlines have grown increasingly vocal. Jet2 said on 15 September that it had mounted a round-the-clock recovery operation after the earlier failure, that around 7,200 of its customers due to fly home had required extra support at the peak of the disruption, and called for urgent and clear action on system resilience and accountability. easyJet has additionally said that two failures within a month calls into question the resilience of NATS's systems.
Ryanair has gone further on previous occasions. After a radar failure in July 2025, Neal McMahon, the airline's chief operating officer, called for Martin Rolfe to resign as chief executive of NATS, saying passengers were being hit with delays because of his continued mismanagement, and calling on the Transport Secretary to intervene if he did not go voluntarily.
A pattern of failures
Today’s disruption is the third technical failure at NATS to affect passengers in just over three years. The August 2023 shutdown affected more than 700,000 passengers and cost airlines an estimated £100 million. The Civil Aviation Authority's independent review made 34 recommendations and identified shortcomings in NATS's contingency planning, its management of engineering resources and the way it notified airlines and airports during an incident. NATS published its own account of that failure and the solution it implemented. A radar problem in July 2025 caused several hundred cancellations and delays of more than four hours.
Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, described this month's earlier disruption as "completely unacceptable" and ordered an independent review by the Civil Aviation Authority. That review has not yet reported. It was commissioned to examine the 8 September failure, and it is not yet clear whether its terms will be extended to cover Monday's incident.
NATS has said it invested more than £1 billion in systems and technology over the past decade and intends to seek approval for a further £1 billion of investment before the end of 2033.
