Major air traffic control disruption in London had knock-on impact on Belfast

Airlines worked hard overnight to recover their flight operations after an air traffic control (ATC) fault caused 150 UK flights to be cancelled on Wednesday afternoon.

Aviation analytics company Cirium said 84 departures and 71 arrivals were cancelled to or from UK airports up to 10pm on Wednesday.

Several flights were diverted to other European airports.

There was limited disruption yesterday, with a handful of British Airways flights cancelled because aircraft and crew were out of position.

Northern Ireland was also impacted on Wednesday, but things returned to normal by yesterday.

A spokeswoman for George Best Belfast City Airport said that some flights had been delayed or cancelled on Wednesday, but that normal service had resumed by yesterday morning.

Belfast International Airport told the News Letter that one flight to and from Gatwick was cancelled on Wednesday but that all was operating “as normal” by yesterday.

Nats Holdings, formally National Air Traffic Services, worked with airlines and airports to clear the backlog of flights and said that departures at all airports resumed on Thursday night.

In August 2023 more than 700,000 passengers suffered disruption when flights were grounded at UK airports when Nats suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.

Ryanair has now called on Mr Rolfe to resign, claiming “no lessons have been learnt” since the August 2023 outage.

The airline’s chief operating officer Neal McMahon said: “It is outrageous that passengers are once again being hit with delays and disruption due to Martin Rolfe’s continued mismanagement of Nats.”

By Thursday morning officials said a “radar-related issue” caused the air traffic control (ATC) failure that grounded the flights across the UK.

Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe was summoned to meet Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander on Thursday morning.

Airlines are demanding an explanation for what happened.

A spokesperson for Nats said: “This was a radar-related issue which was resolved by quickly switching to the back-up system during which time we reduced traffic to ensure safety.

“There is no evidence that this was cyber related.”

The PA news agency understands that the back-up system continues to be used by controllers while investigations continue.

The problem happened at Nats’ control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire, and affected the vast majority of England and Wales.

A Government source said the failure lasted around 20 minutes, and the level of disruption was similar to a day with bad weather.