NATS connectivity failure disrupts UK flights two weeks after Swanwick outage

Morning failure at Prestwick

A technical connectivity issue at the Prestwick air traffic control centre in Scotland caused flight delays and cancellations across the United Kingdom on Monday, 21 September 2026. The disruption concentrated primarily in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and northern England, affecting airports in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Belfast, Liverpool, and Manchester. According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, 72 flights arriving or departing the UK were cancelled by 09:30 GMT out of more than 6,000 scheduled operations. Highlands and Islands Airports confirmed that schedules across its 11 Scottish regional hubs, including Inverness, Dundee, and Islay, suffered disruption. NATS announced later in the morning that engineers had fixed the underlying connectivity fault, though residual schedule delays persisted throughout the network.

Airline backlash and resignation demands

The outage drew sharp criticism from airline executives, following a separate system failure two weeks earlier. Ryanair reported that more than 140 of its flights suffered delays, disrupting travel plans for over 25,000 passengers. Ryanair chief operations officer Neal McMahon renewed demands for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to step down from his post.

“Martin Rolfe has presided over repeated system failures, repeated passenger disruption and repeated failures to deliver an effective back-up system. Enough is enough. Martin Rolfe should resign today.”

EasyJet stated that the incident called into question the resilience of NATS infrastructure, while British Airways described the recurrence as disappointing. Jet2 chief executive Steve Heapy demanded urgent accountability and resilience measures, noting that recurring disruptions can no longer be tolerated.

“This morning's disruption comes days after Nats published a report into its latest major failure and it is simply not good enough for this critical national infrastructure to keep letting customers down. There have been too many incidents, too many reports and too many promises of lessons being learned. What customers and airlines need now is action, accountability and proper resilience, and we need it urgently.”

Government response and operational recovery

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander acknowledged the disruption on social media platform X, calling the incident deeply frustrating for passengers facing back-to-back travel complications. Alexander noted that residual delays would continue while air traffic management systems completed their reset and returned to normal traffic flow rates. NATS maintained that airports south of Manchester remained broadly unaffected, though outbound flights heading north and flights originating from Scottish airports faced restrictions to preserve operational safety.

“In the real world, we accept technology can and sometimes does fail. Our job is minimising disruption where possible. What isn't acceptable is any incident where safety is compromised - this is always our first priority.”

Secondary disruption also extended to southern facilities, with Bristol Airport logging departure delays of up to two hours and cancellations to Nice, Barcelona, and Edinburgh.

Pattern of air traffic system disruptions

Monday's breakdown is the second technical failure to hit NATS within a single month. On 8 and 9 September 2026, a software defect at the Swanwick air traffic control centre led to the cancellation of 2,000 flights and disrupted travel for more than 330,000 passengers. NATS stated that Monday's connectivity fault was completely unrelated to the Swanwick software defect. The British airspace manager had previously encountered system breakdowns in July 2025 and in 2023, the latter affecting more than 700,000 travelers across the UK network.