Overview
- A National Air Traffic Services (Nats) flight‑processing system shut down for about four hours on Tuesday, Sept 8, causing roughly 2,000 cancellations and delays for hundreds of thousands of passengers across UK airports.
- Nats has opened an internal technical inquiry due next week and the Civil Aviation Authority has launched an independent review to identify the technical chain of events that triggered the outage.
- The Financial Times reported a single military flight plan may have set off the failure but the Ministry of Defence has denied any indication of military error and has declined further comment while Nats investigates.
- Operators told managers the affected system did not have a dedicated live backup because it is undergoing a major overhaul, which has focused attention on short‑term resilience and who is accountable for the disruption.
- Industry and political pressure is growing on Nats and CEO Martin Rolfe, and the incident has renewed concerns about replacing the ageing National Airspace System with the delayed Indra project and the potential for similar failures before that switchover.