Hundreds of flights affected as air traffic control glitch hits UK airports again

A fresh technical problem with air traffic control disrupted air traffic across northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, causing hundreds of flights to be delayed. The disruption came less than two weeks after a similar incident caused chaos across UK airports.Stranded passengers at Terminal 5 of London's Heathrow airport after some departing flights were cancelled on September 8. (Photo: Reuters)Hundreds of flights across the UK faced delays on Monday after a fresh technical problem at the country's air traffic control provider disrupted airspace in northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, The Independent reported.The issue came less than two weeks after a air traffic control system failure caused over 2,000 flight cancellations and widespread disruption across the UK. National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the UK's main air traffic control provider, said the latest problem was unrelated to the earlier incident.The NATS said it was investigating a technical issue at its Prestwick centre in Scotland. To maintain safety, air traffic restrictions were imposed to manage demand while engineers worked to resolve the problem, according to BBC.“Airports south of Manchester are broadly unaffected, however flights heading north and flights departing Scottish airports are currently subject to some delay,” NATS said. The air traffic control provider apologised for the disruption and advised passengers to check with their airlines for the latest information.FLIGHT OPS AT SCOTLAND, NORTHERN IRELAND AIRPORTS HITAirports in Scotland and Northern Ireland were among those reporting disruption. Manchester airport said some flights were delayed by up to an hour, while Edinburgh airport reported delays and cancellations. Highlands and Islands Airports Limited said schedules were being affected across the airports it operates, including Dundee, Inverness and Islay.Belfast City Airport also reported several cancellations, including flights to and from Manchester, Amsterdam, London City, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Belfast International Airport advised passengers to check with their airlines.London City Airport later said it was also experiencing some disruption because of the issue at Prestwick, The Mirror reported.Ryanair said it had been notified of a NATS “equipment failure” affecting airspace over Scotland and northern England. British Airways said it was “disappointed” that another NATS technical problem had caused disruption to passengers, The Independent reported.“Yet another technical fault with NATS means some of our customers are likely to experience disruption to their travel plans today,” a British Airways spokesperson said.NATS stressed that the latest issue was separate from the major outage earlier this month, which was traced to a software defect in part of its flight data system. The September 8 incident led to restrictions lasting about six hours and disrupted hundreds of thousands of passengers as airlines worked to clear the resulting backlog.NATS said its preliminary investigation found that the earlier software defect occurred when a manual aircraft-code request was interrupted by a higher-priority activity, corrupting subsequent flight-data updates. The company said safety was never compromised.The latest failure is likely to add to pressure on NATS after the earlier outage prompted criticism from airlines and the UK government. The government has ordered an independent review of the September 8 incident, while NATS has said it is working on a permanent fix for the software problem identified in that outage.- EndsPublished By: Prateek ChakrabortyPublished On: Sep 21, 2026 15:04 IST