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New air traffic control failure delays UK flights

By AAP Newswire

Sep 21, 2026

UK airports face travel disruption — Flights across the UK have been disrupted by a technical issue with air traffic control. -EPA

Flights at several British airports have been delayed due to an air traffic control failure, Britain's NATS air traffic ‌control provider says, less than two weeks after a separate issue halted ‌flights across the UK.

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Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast airports were experiencing delays, which NATS said was related to an issue at its Prestwick centre in Scotland, while London's Gatwick and City Airports said there would be ‌some disruption.

Airline ‌easyJet said ⁠it had cancelled some flights, while British Airways warned its customers that they were likely to experience disruption on Monday.

NATS said Monday's delays were "unrelated to the issue two weeks ago", when around 2000 flights were cancelled due to a software ⁠defect.

"Airports south of Manchester are ‌broadly unaffected, however flights heading north and flights departing Scottish airports are currently subject to some ‌delay," NATS said in a statement.

A previous outage in August 2023 cost airlines STG100 million ($A188 million) and caused travel chaos. Ryanair, Europe's biggest airline, has been calling for NATS CEO Martin Rolfe to step down.

EasyJet said Monday's disruption, which did not appear to ‌be as severe as the failure two weeks ago that delayed hundreds of thousands of people, underlined the weakness in the air traffic operator's systems.

"This, once again, calls into question the resilience of NATS' systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures," easyJet ⁠said.

with AP