UK air traffic control hit by second technical fault in two weeks

A technical fault at the UK's Prestwick air traffic control centre disrupted flights on Monday morning, less than two weeks after a separate failure at the Swanwick centre caused widespread cancellations.

The Prestwick facility handles flights over Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north of England, accounting for roughly 42 percent of UK air traffic. While engineers looked for the cause, the national air navigation service provider NATS restricted traffic. Airports including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Newcastle and Belfast reported delays and cancellations. Effects were also felt further south, at Bristol, London City, Luton and Gatwick.

NATS said the cause was a connectivity problem in part of the system network affecting operations in Scotland. By late morning the service reported the fault had been fixed. It said it would take time before traffic returned to normal. By midday, the aviation data provider Cirium had counted 35 cancelled or unoperated departures from the UK and 37 cancelled arrivals. Glasgow was particularly affected, with connections to Paris, Luton, Southampton, Belfast and Derry among those dropped.

The earlier disruption came on 8 September, when a technical fault at the Swanwick control centre near Southampton led to around 2,000 flights being cancelled according to the account of that outage. Airlines including Ryanair and Easyjet have voiced frustration at the repeat failure.