British Airport Chaos 2023: What happened and why are flights delayed?
The UK's air traffic control system experienced major technical issues on August Bank Holiday Monday, one of the busiest travel days of the year, causing widespread flight disruptions across British airspace. The National Air Traffic Service (NATS) reported problems with its automated flight plan processing system. This forced air traffic controllers to manually handle flight plans, significantly reducing air traffic capacity on a day when flights were already at peak volumes. Although NATS said the technical malfunction was resolved, residual delays and cancellations continued for hours after the issue was fixed as controllers worked to safely manage reduced traffic flow. The disruption affected many flights within UK airspace on what is typically one of the busiest flying days for British airports.
