Spain flights delayed as UK’s air traffic control fails for the second time in two weeks

Passengers flying out of Glasgow and Edinburgh this Monday were grounded again as a fresh fault at NATS’ Prestwick control centre cut Scottish airspace capability by 60 per cent. It’s happened just three days after NATS published its own report on what went improper last time.

Belfast, Dundee and Inverness also hit by the fault

The problem began at NATS, the UK’s air traffic control provider, whose Prestwick centre in Ayrshire manages air traffic across Scotland, Northern Ireland, northern England and the North Atlantic. Controllers cut Scottish airspace capability by 60 per cent while engineers worked on the fault, with restrictions initially resulting from lift by 11am.

Glasgow and Edinburgh took the brunt of the disruption, and Belfast International, Dundee and Inverness were also affected. Airports south of Manchester were largely unaffected, so this wasn’t a country-wide shutdown, though delays were still rippling through the network into the afternoon.

Ryanair’s routes between the UK and Ireland were caught up within the backlog too, and Spain’s own flights from Mallorca and other parts of the country were amongst those delayed.

A Jet2 service from Prestwick to Lanzarote reportedly stayed grounded and a Glasgow to Alicante departure ran late, in response to the Scottish Sun, with some passengers said to be waiting greater than two hours. 

It’s a distinct system to the one which failed on September 8

NATS was quick to say this fault is unrelated to the software defect that cancelled greater than 2,000 flights earlier this month. That failure hit Swanwick, the control centre in Hampshire that covers southern England, and was eventually traced to a one-millisecond glitch in a preliminary report NATS published on Friday September 18, just three days before Prestwick went down too.

Two different centres, two different faults, but for passengers who’ve now been caught up in each, the excellence matters lower than the pattern.

EasyJet says the pattern is the true problem

An easyJet spokesperson didn’t hold back, saying the most recent failure “calls into query the resilience of NATS’ systems” and pointing to “the necessity for firm actions to forestall these repeated failures.” 

What to do in case your flight to Spain is affected 

If you’re flying to or from Spain through a Scottish airport this week, the recommendation stays the identical for the reason that last disruptions: check your flight status directly with the airline moderately than assuming “someone will let me know if something’s improper,” and keep hold of your boarding pass and any receipts for food or accommodation bought due to delay.

Aena, Spain’s airports operator, has already clarified that passengers delayed by greater than three hours on flights to, from or inside Spain could be entitled to compensation of as much as €600 under EU rules, whichever airline or airport caused the hold-up. Two failures in two weeks means it’s price knowing that now, moderately than checking out on the gate.