Overview
- Nats’ flight‑processing system shut for about four hours on Tuesday, causing more than 2,000 cancellations and widespread delays that affected hundreds of thousands of passengers.
- The Financial Times reported that a single UK military flight plan may have triggered the cascade that led to the outage, a claim the Ministry of Defence has publicly denied while Nats says a full technical investigation is under way.
- Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has given Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe seven days to produce a written explanation and the Civil Aviation Authority has opened an independent review of the incident.
- Reports say Nats told airport and airline operations managers the affected system did not have a dedicated live backup during a major overhaul, a shortcoming critics say helps explain why one data error spread across the network.
- The CAA has indicated the outage is likely to be classified as an ‘extraordinary circumstance’, which could limit automatic compensation for delays even as airlines must provide care and pressure mounts over leadership and legal exposure after a similar 2023 failure.