The UK's National Air Traffic Services experienced a second critical glitch in September 2026, causing widespread flight disruptions across the UK and Ireland and prompting calls for CEO Martin Rolfe's resignation. The incident was the fourth failure at NATS in under four years, with Prime Minister Andy Burnham expressing heightened concern about system resilience.
Several UK airports, including Manchester Airport, experienced flight delays on September 21, 2026, due to an air traffic control system failure. The provider stated the outage was unrelated to a similar failure two weeks earlier.
A technical issue at the Prestwick air traffic control centre on September 21, 2026 disrupted flights across Scotland, Northern Ireland, and northern England. Airlines including British Airways and easyJet cancelled or delayed services; the fault was later resolved after engineers investigated the problem at the National Air Traffic Services facility.
A UK military aircraft triggered a major air traffic control meltdown on September 8, 2026 by submitting spurious flight data into the NATS system, causing a wider system failure that grounded thousands of flights. The incident was reported on September 11, 2026.
A technical failure at Britain's National Air Traffic Services (NATS) on 8–10 September 2026 grounded flights for nearly four hours, causing nearly 2,000 flight cancellations across UK airports including Heathrow and Gatwick. Passengers reported hours stuck on planes and sleeping on airport floors as travel chaos extended across multiple days.
A technical failure in Britain's National Air Traffic Services (NATS) flight data processing system on 8–9 September 2026 disrupted more than 1,000 flights across UK airports, with over 2,000 cancellations reported by 10 September. The outage lasted nearly four hours on 8 September, affecting London Heathrow, Gatwick, and other major airports, triggering days of cascading travel chaos and passenger ordeals.