NATS Technical Fault Cancels Around 200 UK Flights, Causing Delays at Dublin and Belfast Airports

A technical fault at UK air traffic control provider NATS has disrupted flights across Britain and Ireland, with around 200 flights cancelled so far and that number expected to rise, according to flight monitoring website Flightradar24. NATS, which provides air traffic control services to 15 UK airports, said it was investigating a technical issue in its "flight processing system" and that engineers were on site working to restore normal operations. "Flights are still departing and airspace is open, but recovery will take some time," the provider said.

In Ireland, Graeme McQueen, head of media relations at daa, the operator of Dublin Airport, confirmed that some flights in and out of Dublin Airport were subject to delays. Belfast City Airport also warned of potential disruption to arriving and departing flights. The worst-affected airports, according to Flightradar24, were Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham. At Heathrow, 352 flights were delayed out of a daily average of around 1,300. Gatwick saw 281 delayed out of an average 850 operations, Manchester 249 out of 650, and Birmingham 101 out of 300. Edinburgh Airport reported 58% of its flights delayed, with an average delay of 26 minutes, ranking fourth on Flightradar24's global air traffic disruption map.

Other affected airports included Jersey, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Southampton, London City, Liverpool John Lennon and those operated by Manchester Airport Group — Stansted and East Midlands. Heathrow said arriving flights were "currently not affected." Cardiff Airport said the impact there was "currently minimal." Budget airline EasyJet said some of its flights were "unable to operate" due to the issue, and that delays were spreading across Europe. The airline said it would offer affected customers a free transfer, refund, or meals and hotel accommodation as needed. British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said on X that she was aware of the issue and that engineers were "fixing it as we speak."

The disruption follows a similar NATS outage in 2023, after which Britain's aviation regulator ordered the provider to review its contingency plans. Airline bosses said that incident cost the industry over £100 million in refunds and compensation. A further radar-related technical issue disrupted flights for more than four hours in July 2024.

A single flight-processing fault at one provider was enough to ripple across airports in three separate jurisdictions within hours, showing how tightly Irish and continental schedules are coupled to UK airspace management even though NATS has no jurisdiction there. Airlines like EasyJet absorbed the immediate cost through transfers, refunds and hotel accommodation, while airports from Edinburgh to Cardiff experienced wildly different severity depending on their exposure to affected routes and controllers.

Air traffic control outages of this kind sit outside airline control entirely, which is why compensation frameworks such as EasyJet's default to rebooking and welfare support rather than blame allocation — the airline cannot fix the underlying system, only manage passengers around it. That the 2023 NATS failure alone cost the industry over £100 million in refunds and compensation, and a further outage followed in July 2024, indicates that contingency measures ordered after the earlier incident have not eliminated recurrence.

What happens next depends on how quickly NATS restores its flight processing system and whether the regulator opens a fresh review given this is now the third disclosed technical failure in three years. Airline bosses' framing of cost after the 2023 event suggests industry pressure for stronger resilience commitments will resurface once this incident's scale and duration are confirmed.