The NATS technical failure that cancelled more than 1,300 flights to and from UK airports has now triggered an independent regulatory review, as the full scale of the disruption (and a pattern of repeated system breakdowns) comes into focus.
Martin Rolfe, chief executive of National Air Traffic Services, was summoned by transport secretary Heidi Alexander as the chaos entered a second day. Rolfe told Sky News: ‘I am the CEO of a piece of critical infrastructure, so it is my job to take responsibility for that. What I absolutely take responsibility for is keeping people safe and delivering the best service we possibly can on a day like today.’
He said he ‘always accept[s] full responsibility’ when asked whether he was considering his position. The focus now, he said, was on resolving the issue and helping airlines, airports, and passengers.
What Caused the NATS Technical Failure
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said its preliminary review found the incident occurred due to an anomaly that forced the system to stop processing flight plans. The system was then closed to maintain safety and required manual operation to keep services running.
According to NATS’s own preliminary report, restrictions were in place for approximately six hours. The software fault only affected flights in the London Area Control centre, which handles higher-level traffic mainly above 24,500ft, but restrictions had to be imposed across the entire UK so that the National Airspace System (NAS) could be restarted and flight data reloaded. That decision cascaded cancellations well beyond the area of the actual fault.
By 6am on Wednesday, 246 flights had been cancelled at Heathrow alone, according to FlightRadar, with a further 33 at Gatwick. NATS said it took more than two days for the backlog to clear, with hundreds of thousands of passengers’ travel plans disrupted in total.
Airways Magazine reports that NATS published an 18-page preliminary investigation report dated 16 September, describing the failure as traceable to ‘a small subsection of coding.’ A full Major Incident Investigation report is due within 60 days of the incident.
CAA Joint-Interim Chief Executive Rob Bishton said: ‘If there is evidence to suggest NATS may have breached its statutory and licensing obligations we will consider whether any further action is necessary.’
A Third Major Breakdown in Three Years
This was Britain’s third significant NATS stoppage in just over three years, and the pattern is hard to dismiss as bad luck.
The 2023 failure, over the August bank holiday weekend, disrupted 700,000 passengers. BBC News reported at the time that an engineer who could not fix the fault remotely took three hours to reach the work site. A smaller outage in 2025 caused around 150 cancellations.
The most recent incident, separate from the September failure described here, was caused by a technical failure at NATS’s control centre in Prestwick, which handles traffic across northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland and serves about 42% of UK air traffic. Ryanair told BBC News that outage affected 140 of its flights and 25,000 of its passengers, and the carrier reiterated its calls for Rolfe to resign.
NATS said of the September incident: ‘This has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover.’ Three outages in three years suggest the problem is structural, not incidental.
Alexander is due to address MPs in the Commons for the second reading of the Civil Aviation (Consumer Protection and Regulatory Reform) Bill, listed as Bill 132 2026-27. The timing could hardly be worse for a government trying to legislate new consumer protections into the aviation sector at the precise moment its air traffic control provider is demonstrating why such protections are needed.
The CAA’s independent review and the 60-day Major Incident Investigation report are the next hard deadlines. If either finds that NATS breached its licensing obligations, the pressure on Rolfe’s position will intensify considerably, and the case for structural reform of how the UK manages its airspace will become very difficult to resist.
