Nearly two dozen flights were canceled on Thursday in the U.K., a day after technical issues with Britain’s air traffic control system caused widespread disruption across the country’s airports.
National Air Traffic Services (NATS), which provides air traffic control services for planes flying in U.K. airspace and the eastern part of the North Atlantic, said on Wednesday that its systems were fully operational, with capacity returning to normal after it switched to a backup system.
The second outage in as many years at NATS also affected Gatwick Airport near London, Edinburgh Airport in Scotland and other locations, resulting in 122 cancellations as of 6:30 p.m. GMT on Wednesday, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
Transport Minister Heidi Alexander said she would meet NATS’ chief executive Martin Rolfe “to understand what happened and how we can prevent reoccurrence.”
NATS is working closely with airlines and airports to clear the backlog, Alexander wrote on the social media platform X.
Across U.K. airports, 12 departures and 11 arrivals had been canceled on Thursday as of 7:30 a.m. GMT, according to Cirium.
At least 16 flights, including departures to Brussels and Toronto and arrivals from New York and Berlin, had been cancelled at Heathrow Airport, according to its website.
Heathrow, Britain’s largest and Europe’s busiest airport, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the latest cancellations.
Ryanair Chief Operating Officer Neal McMahon called on NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign, saying no lessons had been learnt since the August 2023 disruption caused by a malfunction in the automatic processing of flight plans.
NATS, which apologized to those affected by the failure on Wednesday, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for a response to McMahon’s comments.
Heathrow was also hit by a fire at a power sub-station in March, which stranded thousands of passengers.
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