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 disruption, the latest in a series of failures, that renewed questions about the resilience of Britain’s aviation infrastructure, resulted in the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights, apart from leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded.

Both NATS and its boss Martin Rolfe have come under massive industry pressure, with Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, calling for his removal, while citing his role in the last system meltdown in August 2023, when cancelled flights cost operators 100 million pounds (USD 135 million).

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.

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

“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,” NATS said on X (formerly Twitter).

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 whole aviation network”.

Rolfe 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
European budget carriers Wizz Air and Ryanair, known for their fierce rivalry, 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.

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 on 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.

At Heathrow, British Airways became the most affected carrier, cancelling 16 of 333 scheduled departures.

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