40 Manchester Airport flights cancelled or delayed

Manchester Airport confirmed this is due to a technical issue at National Air Traffic Services’ (NATS) control centre in Prestwick, Scotland.

The issue affected airports across northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland and follows a separate NATS outage earlier this month that led to more than 2,000 flight cancellations.

A Manchester Airport spokesperson said: “An air traffic control system operated by NATS has been affected by a technical issue causing delays to flights from some UK airports.

“Passengers due to travel today are advised to keep an eye out for updates from their airlines.”

The airport later confirmed that the air traffic control issue has been fixed but said some flights still may be affected.

EasyJet, KLM, Aer Lingus and Ryanair were among the airlines cancelling services from Manchester, including flights to Belfast, Amsterdam and Brussels.

Industry leaders and airlines criticised the repeated failures and called for urgent improvements.

Tim Alderslade, chief executive of Airlines UK, said: “Yet another NATS failure is causing delays and disruption for passengers and airlines alike, and comes just days after its report into the most recent major outage.

“Passengers and airlines deserve better and the independent CAA report, together with the forthcoming Civil Aviation Bill, must address the underlying weaknesses in the system so that these failures stop happening.”

EasyJet said: “This, once again, calls into question the resilience of Nats’ systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures.”

Steve Heapy, chief executive of Jet2, said: “It is simply not good enough for this critical national infrastructure to keep letting customers down.

“Customers work hard to look forward to their holidays and airlines work hard to deliver those holidays.

“What customers and airlines need now is action, accountability and proper resilience, and we need it urgently.”

Ryanair called for the resignation of NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe.

Neal McMahon, chief operations officer for Ryanair, said: “Martin Rolfe has presided over repeated system failures, repeated passenger disruption and repeated failures to deliver an effective back-up system.

“Enough is enough.

“Martin Rolfe should resign today.”

Passengers at Manchester Airport faced delays and cancellations throughout Monday.

Among the affected flights were easyJet’s 7.10am to Belfast and 11am to Amsterdam, KLM’s 11am service to Amsterdam, and Aer Lingus’ 12.40pm to Belfast.

Ryanair’s 8.30pm service to Brussels was also cancelled.

Delays ranged from 40 minutes to more than three hours.

Full list of delayed and cancelled flights from Manchester Airport