Dozens of flights to and from Britain were cancelled again today, as disruption from a major air traffic control technical failure stretched into a third day.
Across UK airports, 51 services were scrapped, with London Heathrow hit hardest. The airport accounted for 28 cancellations, made up of 21 inbound flights and seven departures.
Gatwick saw a further 11 flights cancelled, while five services were axed at Glasgow. Smaller numbers of cancellations were also reported at Aberdeen, London City, Luton and Manchester airports.
However, the widespread travel disruption, which has affected an estimated 250,000 passengers since Tuesday, appeared to be gradually easing, with flight schedules expected to return to normal later.
The systems failure has led to more than 2,000 flight cancellations so far and intensified pressure on National Air Traffic Services (NATS) chief executive Martin Rolfe, with calls for him to resign.
Among his fiercest critics is Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary, who has described Mr Rolfe’s position as ‘untenable’ following the air traffic control meltdown.
Mr O’Leary is expected to renew his criticism of the NATS boss when he addresses Ryanair’s annual general meeting at the airline’s headquarters near Dublin Airport this morning.
Airlines continued to face cancellations and delays today as they worked through the knock-on effects, with aviation analytics firm Cirium reporting that 2,145 flights had been affected over the previous two days.
Passengers stand with their luggage as they queue to check-in at London Gatwick yesterday
National Air Traffic Services (NATS) boss Martin Rolfe has faced calls to resign this week
A total of 399 flights were cancelled or did not fly yesterday. The worst affected airport was Heathrow, which saw 79 out of a total of 666 departures affected.
Despite having presided over three major failures in recent years, Mr Rolfe earned £1.42million in pay and bonuses last year and £1.49million the year before.
But he was summoned for talks with Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander yesterday amid growing calls from within the industry for him to be sacked.
Mr Rolfe has been given a week to report back on the cause behind the technical failure which is expected to have cost the industry tens of millions of pounds.
The minister later told MPs she did not believe the glitch was ‘unavoidable’ and said she had asked the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to conduct an independent review.
‘A four-hour air traffic outage yesterday left hundreds of thousands of passengers facing cancellations, diversions and delays,’ she told the Commons.
‘I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to passengers for this disruption,’ the minister added, vowing to leave ‘no stone unturned’ in getting to the bottom of the failure.
‘This morning I have spoken to NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe, who informed me this outage was due to a technical issue at their Swanwick site.
‘So, while my understanding from NATS is that we can rule out a cyber-attack on this occasion, I do not believe this issue was unavoidable.
‘But I am clear that passengers should not have to face this disruption. I have therefore asked the CAA to conduct an independent review.’
Despite this Andy Burnham’s spokesman said the Prime Minister still had confidence in the air traffic control provider’s head.
Mr Burnham’s spokesman said Ms Alexander had met with Mr Rolfe to ‘raise significant concerns at the scale of disruption on behalf of both passengers and industry’.
‘She’s asked him to carry out a full investigation into what happened to make sure that lessons are learned…,’ he added. ‘She set a deadline for them to report back in a week’s time.’
Asked whether the government still had confidence in Mr Rolfe, he said: ‘We have confidence in him and he’s been tasked with the investigation.’
But airline bosses were left furious with Wizz Air also publicly demanding for Mr Rolfe to be sacked.
Passengers wait to drop their bags at London Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Two yesterday
Airlines UK, the association of UK airlines, said more than 155,000 passengers had flights cancelled while more than 180,000 experienced delays, taking the total number affected beyond 330,000.
In a strongly worded letter, the association’s chief executive Tim Alderslade wrote to the Transport Secretary yesterday to raise ‘serious concern’ and call for action.
‘Airlines should not be left as the insurer of last resort for failures they did not cause and cannot control,’ he said.
The letter, which was highly critical of NATS which serves 15 UK airports, said the flight-processing system had failed and the ‘full scale’ of the disruption was ‘still becoming clear’.
‘This kind of failure simply cannot happen again,’ it said.
The CAA said last night that passengers, many of whom were forced to book hotels and alternative last-minute flights, are unlikely to be entitled to any compensation over the disruption.
It said under passenger rights rules, the NATS issue is ‘likely to be considered the result of extraordinary circumstances’.
‘This means that although passengers should be looked after by airlines, they are unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident,’ it said in a statement.
Mr Rolfe yesterday apologised for the widespread chaos for which he said he took ‘full responsibility’.
‘We will be doing a very thorough and full investigation,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘We have at this point ruled out a cyber-attack.’
‘Inevitably, things do go wrong in complex systems. We never want them to. We always hope they won’t, but we absolutely plan for them to and make sure we handle them properly.’
Defending the system, Mr Rolfe added the UK has ‘one of the best reputations’ globally for its air traffic control service, from both a safety and resilience perspective.
He said since NATS was partially privatised 25 years ago more than £1billion had been invested in the technology ‘consistently improving’ the service and its safety.
‘But all of those things don’t detract from the fact that when these things happen, it is disappointing and upsetting, for which I apologise.’
NATS said the failure occurred in its flight processing system at its Swanwick headquarters near Southampton, where air traffic controllers guide flights across all UK airspace.
But it said it was not the same issue which triggered the outages in 2023 and 2025 which also caused mass disruption.
Mr Rolfe said that his teams were now focused on dealing with the ‘huge tail of disruption’ caused by the outage, before they could examine the cause behind it.
‘What I will say is, I don’t believe we’ve ever seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation.’
British Airways said it has ‘long made the case for improved resilience in aviation’ and issues raised by the system failure need ‘to be addressed as a matter of urgency’.
The airline was the worst affected airline by disruption yesterday, as it saw 88 of its 507 flights scheduled to depart affected. Bosses said they were ‘incredibly sorry’ to customers and that the issue had been ‘entirely out of our control’.
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