However, hubs have warned that it would take time for operations to ‌return to normal after the disruption left aircraft in “the wrong places.”

The hours-long disruption has increased the pressure upon the NATS, with airlines ramping up their criticism of Britain’s aviation infrastructures, while the Andy Burnham government, taking a grim view of the situation, has summoned Martin Rolfe, the agency’s chief, to explain the shutdown.

The disruption resulted in the cancellation of 2,000 flights, apart from leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded at major airports across the European country.

Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, has called for Rolfe’s removal, while citing his role in the last system meltdown in August 2023, when cancelled flights cost operators 100 million pounds (USD 135 million).

Transport minister Heidi Alexander will reportedly hear directly from Rolfe after she summoned him to explain the fault, amid ​concerns over the resilience of the British aviation sector’s infrastructure and technological resilience.

As operations restarted, Heathrow Airport said passengers should check with their airline before heading to the airport, as schedules would have changed ‌due ⁠to the problems on Tuesday.

“We are expecting knock-on impacts as aircraft and crew reposition,” the UK’s busiest hub said in a statement.

“We know how frustrating this situation is and … are working closely with our ⁠local NATS team and airline partners to recover normal operations as quickly as possible.”

London Gatwick, Britain’s second busiest airport, remarked while advising passengers to ⁠check with their airline first.

While 150,000 Ryanair passengers got affected by the outage after it cancelled ⁠more than 200 flights, British Airways had to cancel and divert 100 flights, with another tens of thousands impacted.

Two of NATS’ previous operational glitches resulted in shutdowns in August 2023 and in July 2025. On both occasions, major airports, including Britain’s largest, Heathrow, got affected.

“I am seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job,” Alexander said on X (formerly Twitter).

Michael O’Leary, group CEO of Ryanair, told Reuters the outage was “an absolute rerun” of ​what happened in 2023, when a rogue flight plan caused the shutdown.

“Fire him. He’s been there since 2015. He is useless,” he said of ​Rolfe.

NATS said that the issue, which had impacted its flight data processing system, was resolved. It also dismissed talks about a potential cyber breach affecting its digital architecture.

“It was not the same issue as 2023. This one affected our flight data system at Swanwick. We will conduct a ‌full investigation ⁠to establish the root cause and identify any further action required,” a NATS spokesperson said.

“Recovery from today’s system issue has taken longer than we had hoped. Our system issue is now resolved; we are operating normally and working as hard as possible to clear the backlog of flights,” the agency further clarified on X.

The traffic control provider later said in another X update that it would take time to recover from the disruption, adding that “this ⁠has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the entire aviation network.”

Rolfe also termed the cause of the disruption a new one. While speaking with the BBC Radio, he apologised for what had gone wrong without giving details of what had happened, apart from saying a cyberattack had been ruled out.

He later told Sky News that NATS had not “fully done the investigation” to find the reason behind the technical issue that caused the disruption.

“We don’t have an idea yet of exactly what went wrong,” the NATS boss remarked.

Airlines attack the NATS boss

Forgetting their fierce rivalry, European budget carriers Wizz Air and Ryanair came together to attack NATS and Rolfe while calling for an “overhaul” of the air traffic control provider.

“A critical national infrastructure provider should not repeatedly bring the aviation system to a standstill. NATS is simply not fit for purpose in its current form,” Wizz Air remarked.

“Following the 2023 collapse, we were told lessons would be learned. We were told that resilience would improve. We were told that the systems had been fixed. Yet here we are again,” Ryanair Chief Operations Officer Neal McMahon said.

As per Ryanair’s estimates, the losses from Tuesday’s outage were 3 million pounds so far, after it cancelled 260 flights affecting 48,000 passengers.

In 2024, Britain’s aviation regulator asked NATS to review its outage-related contingency plans after the automatic processing of flight plans malfunctioned a year earlier, causing chaos across the British airports.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) too jumped into the action on Tuesday by “getting in touch” with NATS over the incident and expects the latter to share a full report.

“We will then consider ⁠whether any further steps need to be taken to help secure the safe reliability of the UK’s air traffic control system,” a CAA spokesperson said.

The outage, as per the data from the flight-tracking website Flightradar24, caused the cancellation of 1,300 flights to and from the United Kingdom.

“Another 177 flights got cancelled for Wednesday, nearly all of them at Heathrow, the country’s largest airport,” it added.

Another data point on the flight-tracking platform FlightAware said some 490 departures were delayed at six airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh, and Bristol, as of 1518 GMT Tuesday. Some 525 arrivals at those six airports were either cancelled or delayed.

British Airways on Tuesday cancelled/diverted 100 flights with tens of thousands impacted and said on Wednesday 190 flights had been ​cancelled as disruption continued.

NATS, a public-private partnership that ⁠is partially owned ​by airlines including British Airways and easyJet, pension funds, and the British government, paid its ​owners dividends of 175 million pounds in 2025.

Ryanair has decided to sue NATS at London’s High Court and is seeking over 7 million pounds over the 2023 outage.

The carrier, apart from aggressively pitching for the agency’s leadership overhaul, has called on NATS to reinvest its profits ​into performance improvements and hiring more staff.

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According to aviation consultancy OAG, the hub, which has consistently outperformed its international competitors, including London Heathrow, logged 4.2 million seats in February 2023.

Although Dubai International Airport has the highest monthly capacity in the world, the latest figures are down by 9% from the previous month.

With 3.3 million seats and a 7% drop from the prior month, London Heathrow, a solid rival to Dubai International Airport, placed second overall. The third-place went to Istanbul Airport, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Singapore’s Changi.

The most recent monthly rankings from OAG are based on February’s scheduled airline capacity.

The consulting company also compared the most recent data to the same month in 2019, before the global pandemic COVID-19 began.

Dubai International Airport recently reported carrying over 66 million passengers overall in 2022, an increase of 127% from 2021. The airport anticipates a rise in traffic, with 78 million passengers passing through in total by 2023.

According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), relaxing COVID-19 regulations helped the aviation sector grow in 2017. Compared to 2021, international traffic increased by 152.7% in 2022, surpassing pre-COVID levels by 62.2%.

The average waiting time at Dubai International Airport departure passport control was less than five minutes for over 96% of passengers in 2022, the airport’s operator announced recently.

For arrivals, the average waiting time at passport control queues was less than 13 minutes for over 95% of flyers.

These figures are usually based on average queuing times (weighted by the total number of passengers processed) captured by Dubai Airports’ real-time monitoring system.

Dubai International Airport also mentioned how its ‘Smart Gates’ were speeding customers through the immigration process.

The airport rolled out the feature in 2021, thus enabling flyers to travel without using their identification papers.

Utilising a mix of facial and iris recognition, passengers can check in for their flights and complete immigration formalities sans identification documents. Their faces serve as ‘passports.’

The aviation hub’s baggage handling system processed a total of 62.2 million bags in 2022.

“With a success rate of 99.8%, this translates into 2.2 mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers, an impressive performance for the world’s busiest international hub. In terms of baggage delivery on arrival, 92% of all baggage was delivered within 45 minutes to our customers. The baggage volume in 2022 represents 86.2% of the 2019 baggage volume at DXB,” Dubai International Airport stated.

The baggage delivery performance measures the time from the moment the aircraft comes to a halt on the bay to the time the bags are delivered to the reclaim carousel.

According to OAG, capacity decreased in February 2023 compared to January at every significant airport that made it into its top 10 rankings.

The three aviation hubs that have seen the most significant drops in traffic are Istanbul, Doha, and Bangkok, each of which saw a 10% drop in passengers.

However, some Asian airports have experienced increased passenger volume, with Changi in Singapore, Incheon in Korea, and Suvarnabhumi in Bangkok making OAG’s top 10.

Changi advanced from position 11 to position 4, Incheon advanced from position 45 to position 7, and Suvarnabhumi advanced from position 46 to place 10.

London Heathrow remains the top hub in the European market, followed by Istanbul with 3.2 million seats.

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