Flights at several British airports were delayed on Monday following a new air traffic control failure, with 24 flights cancelled as disruption affected airports across northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Britain’s air traffic control provider, NATS, said the disruption was linked to a connectivity issue at its Prestwick centre in Scotland.

Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast airports reported delays, while London Gatwick and London City airports also warned passengers of disruption.

The latest incident comes less than two weeks after a separate air traffic control problem caused about 2,000 flights to be cancelled across Britain, affecting hundreds of thousands of passengers.

British transport minister Heidi Alexander said the latest problem had been fixed and systems were returning to normal.

“I know this will be deeply frustrating for passengers after the previous issue,” she said on X.

Ryanair said about 25,000 of its passengers were facing delays as a result of Monday’s disruption and renewed its calls for NATS Chief Executive Martin Rolfe to resign.

EasyJet said it had cancelled some flights, while British Airways warned passengers that they were likely to experience disruption.

The Civil Aviation Authority said passengers were “unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident”, although airlines were expected to look after affected passengers.

NATS says latest failure was separate

NATS said Monday’s disruption was caused by a connectivity issue that was “unrelated to the issue two weeks ago”.

The earlier incident was caused by a software defect and resulted in around 2,000 flight cancellations.

By 0858 GMT on Monday, 24 cancellations had been recorded in connection with the latest disruption. NATS said airports south of Manchester were broadly unaffected, while flights heading north and those departing Scottish airports were experiencing delays.

The latest failure has renewed concerns about the reliability of Britain’s air traffic control system, following a previous outage in August 2023 that cost airlines about £100 million ($134 million) and caused widespread travel disruption.

EasyJet said the latest incident highlighted weaknesses in NATS’ systems.

“This, once again, calls into question the resilience of NATS’ systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures,” easyJet said. (Reuters)

•A departure board displays delayed and cancelled flights at London City Airport after an air traffic control failure affected flights across parts of the UK.