Hundreds of easyJet and Ryanair flights have been hit by delays today following an issue at the National Air Traffic Services, with 30,000 Ryanair passengers said to be impacted
Air traffic control issues have caused delays (Image: AFP via Getty Images)
Hundreds of UK flights have been delayed due to an issue at the UK’s air traffic control (ATC).
There was widespread disruption across UK airspace this morning after an issue at the Met Office meant the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) didn’t receive weather information.
As a result, Ryanair saw 155 of its flights delayed, impacting almost 30,000 passengers, with delays of up to three hours. EasyJet was hit harder, with 253 flights delayed – 13% of its total number of planned departures today.
“A Met Office technical issue overnight meant that we were not receiving vital weather information into our NATS systems this morning. Accurate weather information is vital for air traffic controllers and pilots in managing flights safely,” a spokesperson for NATs said
“As a result, some air traffic restrictions were put in place early this morning and these have now been removed. We continue to work with the Met Office, who are working to fully resolve the problem.”
The Met Office has been contacted for comment.
“Nearly three years after NATS catastrophic 2023 system meltdown, UK passengers are once again being delayed because NATS’ systems have failed,” Ryanair Chief Operations Officer, Neal McMahon, said.
“Today’s outage delayed 155 Ryanair flights and disrupted almost 30,000 Ryanair passengers. Families travelling on holiday, people travelling for work and thousands of visitors to the UK have once again paid the price for NATS’ failure.”
Back in August 2023, a technical problem experienced by NATS saw very significant delays and cancellations across the UK. An outage resulted in hundreds of flights being delayed or canceled. In some cases, passengers waited several days for alternative flights. More than 700,000 passengers suffered cancellations and delays.
An investigation into the incident found that an engineer was unable to correct the fault from home, and so arrived at work more than three hours after the incident began in a bid to fix it.
A single flight from Los Angeles to Paris triggered the failure at 8.30am BST on Monday 28 August, the Civil Aviation Authority previously said. The air traffic control system had been confused by a duplicate code – DVL – which represents both Deauville in France and Devil’s Lake in North Dakota, USA.
Despite the engineer’s best efforts to resolve the problem on site, he was unable to do so. The system was eventually restored at 2.30pm after its manufacturer, Frequentis Comsoft, found the fault.
Following an independent review, Jeff Halliwell, Chair of the Independent Review Panel, said: “The incident on 28 August 2023 represented a major failure on the part of the air traffic control system, which caused considerable distress to over 700,000 aviation passengers, and resulted in substantial costs to airlines and airports. Our report sets out a number of recommendations aimed at improving NATS’ operations and, even more importantly, ways in which the aviation sector as a whole should work together more closely to ensure that, if something like this does ever happen again, passengers are better looked after.”
Rob Bishton, Chief Executive of the UK Civil Aviation Authority, added: “This final report gets to the heart of what went wrong in August 2023 and sets out a number of recommendations that are sector-wide in their scope. It is vital that we learn the lessons from any major incident such as this. I would personally like to thank the Panel for all of their efforts in producing a thorough and wide-ranging report, that will help improve the UK’s aviation system for the future.”