Air India flights faced disruption on Tuesday after the UK’s National Air Traffic Services suffered a technical failure affecting its flight data processing system.
The failure triggered more than 1,000 flight cancellations across the UK on Tuesday, with 177 additional flights cancelled for Wednesday.
Heathrow, the principal gateway for India-UK air traffic, was the most affected, alongside Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol.
Air India confirmed the outage forced it to divert, delay or cancel multiple flights scheduled to and from UK airports.
NATS said the system had returned to normal operation, but cautioned that recovery from the resulting backlog would take time.
NATS, formerly known as National Air Traffic Services, is the primary air traffic control provider for UK airspace, handling flight data processing for arrivals and departures across the country’s busiest airports.
September is a peak month for Indian student travel to the UK, meaning the timing of the outage was particularly disruptive for passengers flying to British universities for the new academic term.
NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe said the exact cause of the technical failure was still being investigated, though the system was confirmed to be operating normally again after the fix.
The Civil Aviation Authority was expected to seek a detailed report from NATS on the incident, given the scale of disruption it caused across the network.
Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol airports all reported disrupted flight operations during the outage, with Heathrow the most severely affected.
NATS said recovery from the backlog across the aviation network would take time even after the underlying technical issue was resolved.
This is not the first time a NATS technical failure has caused mass disruption to UK air travel, with similar system outages having grounded flights in the past.
Air India was among several international carriers, alongside UK domestic airlines, affected by the disruption at Heathrow and other British airports.
London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, Wikimedia Commons, CC0
