Air traffic control fault disrupts hundreds of flights at UK airports

A technical fault at NATS, Britain's air traffic control provider, disrupted close to a thousand flights on Tuesday across major UK airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, and others. Around 490 departures were delayed and 525 arrivals were cancelled or delayed. NATS resolved the issue by 1934 BST, though recovery took longer than expected. The incident renewed scrutiny of the system's resilience following similar failures in previous years.

A few hours of outage may on the face of it sound limited but the impact is enormous when a substantial number of airports across the UK are affected.