Chaos has erupted across the UK’s aviation sector today as a major technical fault within National Air Traffic Services (NATS) has grounded flights and sparked widespread disruption at at least 10 major airports.
Passengers at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted, and beyond have been left stranded on runways or stuck in terminals as engineers race to resolve a critical failure in the flight processing system. The disruption, which began earlier this afternoon, has caused a ripple effect across the country, affecting departures at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, London City, and East Midlands airports.
NATS has issued a formal apology to travelers, confirming that the technical issue has been identified. While airspace remains open and flights are currently departing, the system is operating under significant strain, leading to severe delays that are expected to last throughout the evening. According to data provided by Flightradar24 and citing Eurocontrol, normal operations are not expected to resume until 9:00 pm tonight.
“We have identified that the issue was in our flight processing system,” a NATS spokesperson said in a statement. “Our engineers are on-site and working urgently to resume normal operations. We recognize the ongoing disruption to travel, for which we sincerely apologize. Recovery will take some time.”
The situation on the ground has become increasingly frustrated for passengers. At Gatwick, travelers took to social media to vent, with one passenger reporting they had been stuck on the tarmac for over an hour. Similar scenes were reported at other hubs, with Manchester Airport Group—which also operates Stansted and East Midlands—advising customers that while they are monitoring the situation, significant delays to departing flights are inevitable.
While arriving flights appear to be largely unaffected, the bottleneck of grounded departures has created a logistical nightmare. Heathrow Airport confirmed it is supporting the NATS team, noting that the fault is specifically impacting outbound traffic.
This incident is the latest in a series of high-profile technical failures to hit UK air traffic control in recent years. Memories are still fresh of the August 2023 disaster, when a flight plan processing glitch grounded over 700,000 passengers, and a similar radar-related failure last July that forced the cancellation of more than 160 flights.
For now, aviation authorities and airport operators are urging all passengers to avoid traveling to terminals without first checking the status of their flights directly with their airlines. Official updates are being provided via the NATS website and their verified social media channels, as the industry battles to clear the backlog before the projected 9:00 pm normalization deadline.
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