Second UK Air Traffic Disruption in Two Weeks Hits Scottish Hub

UK air navigation provider NATS says it has resolved a technical fault at its Prestwick control centre in Scotland, an incident that triggered flight delays across several Scottish airports on 21 September — less than a fortnight after a separate nationwide failure disrupted UK airspace.

The company characterised the latest problem as a “connectivity issue with part of our systems network” and stressed it was specific to the Scottish operation, with no link to the 8 September outage that caused widespread disruption across UK air traffic control. NATS imposed air traffic restrictions while addressing the fault and said it was working with airports and airlines to lift the remaining restrictions safely and quickly.

Airports including Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen reported delays as a result. Prestwick is one of two principal NATS facilities, managing traffic for the Scottish flight information region (FIR) — a defined block of airspace — while the Swanwick centre in southern England oversees the London FIR.

NATS apologised to affected passengers and directed travellers to check with their airlines for the latest flight information.

The incident has drawn criticism from airline industry group Airlines UK, whose chief executive Tim Alderslade described the UK air traffic system as critical national infrastructure that “must be resilient enough to keep people moving,” adding that “passengers and airlines deserve better.”

The back-to-back events place renewed attention on the resilience of UK airspace management, coming shortly after NATS attributed the earlier September failure to a software issue it said was unrelated to previous outages.

What to watch

• Any NATS statements or official reports on the root cause of the 21 September connectivity fault.
• Findings or recommendations from reviews of the 8 September system failure.
• Potential government or regulatory scrutiny of UK air traffic infrastructure resilience.
• Further statements from Airlines UK or affected carriers regarding service reliability.

Source: original release