Overview
- National Air Traffic Services identified a failure in its flight processing system on Tuesday and deployed engineers after ground stops and heavy restrictions halted or delayed departures at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted, Luton and other UK airports.
- Operations are only partially resumed in places with significant backlogs remaining and Eurocontrol and flight‑tracking services say normal traffic may not return until around 20:00.
- Passengers have been left stranded on aircraft and in terminals and airlines and airports are advising travellers to check flight status with carriers while providing transport, catering or accommodation as required by passenger‑care rules.
- The flight processing system automatically handles flight‑plan data and flow management so its failure forced controllers to use slower manual procedures that sharply reduce the number of safe departures per hour.
- This incident follows major NATS outages in 2023 and regulator warnings in 2024 about contingency planning, raising fresh questions about system resilience, operational costs for airlines and whether contingency capacity is adequate.