LONDON: A sudden technical failure in the UK’s Air Traffic Control flight data processing system caused severe disruption at the country’s major airports, with more than 1,000 flights cancelled and hundreds more delayed.
According to the UK’s National Air Traffic Services, the fault occurred in its flight data processing system and affected 15 major airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted.
Officials later said the technical issue had been resolved, but clearing the backlog of flights will take time and further delays and cancellations are likely on Wednesday. At Heathrow, arrivals remained suspended overnight, while departures were restored on a limited basis.
Flight tracking data showed that over 1,000 flights were cancelled on Tuesday, with many others delayed by several hours. Due to the outage, some aircraft had to be held or diverted to European airports outside the UK.
The technical failure caused major problems for British airlines and passengers. Several major airlines raised questions about NATS’ system performance and called for reforms. NATS said air safety was not compromised during the outage. However, the UK Civil Aviation Authority has requested a full report on the incident to review the reliability of the system.
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