SCOTTISH airports are back to normal service after a technical fault at a crucial air traffic control centre caused hundreds of flights across the UK to be delayed or cancelled.
Glasgow Airport had to cancel one early morning flight to Heathrow yesterday, but there were no other delays. There were no delays or cancellations at either Edinburgh Airport or Prestwick Airport. The disruption was caused by a telephone software failure at the National Air Traffic Service centre in Hampshire on Saturday, which took 12 hours to fix.
Air traffic controllers across the UK and Europe use the system to communicate with each other about flights. Thousands of passengers faced cancellations and had to endure long waits after the failure, which resulted in the system being able to handle about 20% fewer flights than on a normal Saturday.
Juliet Kennedy, from Nats, said controllers were now able to manage normal levels of traffic, but added that passengers could potentially continue to experience some delays because of the earlier problems.
"I recognise that airlines have their schedules disrupted because they end up with aeroplanes in the wrong place so it may take them some time to restore their operation to normal, but the system, from an air traffic perspective, is already back to normal," she said.
The worst-affected airport was Heathrow, which had cancelled 228 flights by 7pm on Saturday. Other affected airports included Gatwick, Stansted, Cardiff, Belfast.
Eurocontrol said 1300 flights had been "severely delayed" across Europe.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article