NATS Prestwick Failure Disrupts UK Flights

A technical problem at NATS’s Prestwick air traffic control center disrupted flights across Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England, causing delays and cancellations at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast and Manchester airports. NATS said the issue was resolved, but warned that knock-on effects could continue; airports advised passengers to check with their airlines, while areas south of Manchester were broadly unaffected apart from limited disruption at London City and elsewhere. The incident was separate from a September 8 NATS software defect that disrupted more than 2,000 flights and affected hundreds of thousands of passengers; that defect was not attributed to a cyberattack, sabotage or military activity, and the government ordered an independent Civil Aviation Authority review. Airlines including Ryanair, EasyJet and British Airways criticized NATS’s resilience, with Ryanair again calling for chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign. Separately, an equipment outage at Philadelphia-area air traffic control facilities temporarily paused flights into Philadelphia International, Teterboro and Newark Liberty airports.