UK air traffic fails twice in 13 days. Such breakdowns usually led to a new review.
Nats, the company that runs UK air traffic control, broke down again on 21 September, 13 days after a fault that cancelled about 2,000 flights.
What happened
A connectivity fault at the Nats control centre in Prestwick disrupted flights across Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England on the morning of , cancelling about 150 to 200 flights, thirteen days after a software defect at the Swanwick centre cancelled about 2,000; easyJet, British Airways, Jet2, Ryanair, Wizz Air and the trade body Airlines UK all called publicly for action.
Nats is the monopoly provider of air traffic control in UK airspace. On the morning of Monday it lost part of its systems network at Prestwick, the centre that handles about 42% of UK air traffic.
Nats limited the flow of flights while engineers worked, and the fault was fixed by about 10.30am. The analysts Cirium counted more than 200 cancellations by the end of the day.
Every large airline that uses this airspace spoke out within hours. EasyJet, the worst hit with 47 cancellations, said the incident called the resilience of the Nats systems into question. Jet2 asked for action, accountability and proper resilience.
Wizz Air UK spoke of a national crisis of confidence and questioned both the leadership and the board. Ryanair, which counted 140 delayed flights, repeated its demand that the chief executive, Martin Rolfe, resign. Nats said the Prestwick fault had nothing to do with the Swanwick software defect.
Two things a reader might expect are already settled. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the regulator, said its independent review of air traffic control resilience is under way and will report within six months. It also said passengers are unlikely to get compensation, because the disruption counts as extraordinary circumstances.
What is open is what the state does about the second failure. The Commons is on its conference break from to . Until , MPs cannot use the fast routes of a statement from a minister or an urgent question.
Sources: BBC, Guardian, UK Parliament calendar
The Pattern
We looked for big service failures at UK companies that run licensed critical services, from power to air traffic, where the public or the industry demanded action once the failure was over. We checked whether a government department or a regulator ordered a new or wider review within 31 days. We found eight since 2019. Three are at Nats itself, and the same two bodies, the Department for Transport and the CAA, decided all three. The closest cases come first.
Show the other 6 cases
The Read
History leans towards something new by . After six of the eight breakdowns, a department or a regulator ordered a fresh review within a month, and five of those six came within nine days. An announcement costs a minister nothing and answers the demand of the day. The closest case is not about flying. South East Water was already under investigation by Ofwat, the water regulator, when it lost supply again in May, and Ofwat added the new incident to the same probe within a month. That is the cheapest move open to the CAA here.
The weak spot is that a review already exists, so the state can say the work is under way and wait for it. That is what happened after the smaller Nats failure of , when nothing was ordered at all. It also happened at Barclays in 2025, where the pressure came from MPs and no regulator acted.
Two things would make a new review less likely: a CAA statement that the six-month review covers everything without change, and a quiet break with no written statement from a minister before . Two things would make it more likely: a licence or enforcement step by the regulator, and a third failure.
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