A 20-minute outage has caused major disruptionpublished at 20:42 British Summer Time
Simon Browning
Transport correspondent
Image source, EPAIt’s been a difficult day for the aviation and airline industry. The temporary outage at NATS – the National Air Traffic Services – lasted only 20 minutes but it has caused major disruption.
NATS effectively manages the motorways of the sky, monitoring where our flights go around the UK.
Safety is seriously compromised when those systems go down, prompting airlines to ground, delay or divert flights.
NATS’s system was back online within 20 minutes but the impact is substantial. The aviation sector and airlines operate on such tiny margins and any disruption or delay can have a huge knock-on effect.
The data is still coming through but, as of 19:30 BST, 122 flights have been cancelled so far, including 67 departures across all UK airports and 55 arrivals.
Plenty of passengers have had their flights diverted which now means planes, passengers and crews are all in the wrong place.
To make matters worse, this comes at a time when – globally – it’s the busiest time for travel.
