Prestwick air traffic control failure disrupts flights across northern UK and Ireland
An equipment failure at the NATS Prestwick centre in Scotland disrupted domestic, Irish, and trans-Atlantic flights on Monday, leading to delays and 24 cancellations across regional airports.
Air traffic fault at Prestwick centre
Air traffic across Scotland, Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Republic of Ireland experienced disruptions on Monday morning, 21 September 2026. The UK National Air Traffic Services (NATS) confirmed an equipment failure at its Prestwick centre in Ayrshire, Scotland. Prestwick serves as the organization's second control centre and oversees airspace across Scotland and northern England. To maintain safety during the outage, controllers applied air traffic regulations to restrict traffic demand. NATS announced that airports south of Manchester remained broadly unaffected, while flights heading north and departures from Scottish airports faced immediate delays.
To maintain safety, air traffic regulations have been applied to manage traffic demand.
Airport disruptions and flight cancellations
The system fault affected departures and arrivals at multiple regional and international airports. Terminals reporting delays included Manchester Airport, Edinburgh Airport, Glasgow Airport, Aberdeen Airport, Belfast City Airport, and Belfast International Airport. Flights operating through Dublin Airport also incurred delays due to restrictions in adjacent UK-managed flight corridors. In addition to domestic and regional routes, the equipment failure disrupted westbound trans-Atlantic services traversing northern airspace. Aviation analytics provider Cirium stated that 24 flights were cancelled across UK airports by Monday morning, though many other flights continued to operate under adjusted schedules.
- A software coding defect disrupts around 2,000 flights across the United Kingdom
- NATS releases an initial report on the previous air traffic disruption
- Equipment failure at the Prestwick centre causes delays across northern UK airspace
Airline reactions and passenger advice
Airlines operating across the United Kingdom and Ireland issued statements regarding the disruption and advised passengers to check flight status updates. Carriers including British Airways, easyJet, and Ryanair experienced schedule interruptions across their networks. Low-cost airline easyJet issued a statement criticising the recurring operational failures at the air traffic provider.
A Nats air traffic control system failure in its Prestwick centre is causing delays to flights with some unable to operate. This, once again, calls into question the resilience of Nats's systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures.
British Airways confirmed that its customers faced travel delays and noted that technical issues at the air navigation service remained entirely beyond airline control.
Yet another technical fault with Nats means some of our customers are likely to experience disruption to their travel plans today. This is disappointing, and while it is an issue that is entirely out of our control, we're doing everything we can to limit the impact on customers and are keeping them updated.
Ryanair alerted passengers travelling to and from the UK and Ireland on Monday to monitor the airline's mobile app for updates following the equipment failure above northern airspace.
Background and recurring technical issues
The equipment fault at Prestwick occurred less than two weeks after a separate system failure disrupted air travel across the UK. In that earlier incident, a software defect involving a small subsection of coding caused the cancellation of around 2,000 flights and affected hundreds of thousands of passengers, primarily around the London area. On 18 September 2026, three days before the Prestwick outage, NATS published an initial report into the previous breakdown, committing to continually improve its critical services. NATS stated that the Monday morning failure at Prestwick was entirely unrelated to the coding defect experienced earlier in the month, adding that specialized engineering teams were on site working to resolve the issue.
