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Air traffic failure was avoidable, says transport secretary
The Civil Aviation Authority will review the outage after more than 2,000 flights were affected and hundreds of thousands of passengers faced disruption.
- On Wednesday, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander ordered an independent review into Nats following Tuesday's four-hour technical outage that caused widespread flight cancellations and delays across the UK.
- Nats, which is 49% government-owned, identified the disruption as a technical failure within its flight processing system at the Swanwick Centre; officials ruled out a cyberattack.
- Aviation analytics firm Cirium reported more than 2,000 flights were affected over two days, while British Airways cancelled almost 550 flights, impacting more than 85,000 passengers, describing the situation as 'entirely out of our control.'
- Airlines UK chief executive Tim Alderslade registered 'serious concerns' over this third major failure in three years, while Wizz Air and Ryanair called for Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign.
- Alexander required Nats to report back within one week, while the Civil Aviation Authority must complete its independent review within six months. Previous outages in 2023 and 2025 heighten concerns about system resilience.
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Hundreds of thousands of Britons may NOT receive compensation despite hours of air travel delays
Hundreds of thousands of Britons may not receive compensation if their flights were hit in Tuesday's and Wednesday's air travel chaos.Nats, which provides air traffic control services to 15 British airports, blamed an issue with its "flight processing system" for nearly 2,000 flight cancellations and major delays on Tuesday and Wednesday.Now, the British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has warned those affected by the disruption may not be in lin…
·London, United Kingdom
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The head of air traffic control agency Nats has a week to submit a report on the reasons for the technical failure that occurred.
Coverage Details
Total News Sources9
Leaning Left3Leaning Right1Center3Last UpdatedBias Distribution43% Left, 43% Center
Bias Distribution
- 43% of the sources lean Left, 43% of the sources are Center
43% Center
L 43%
C 43%
14%
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