'It simply isn’t good enough' Report sent to government after air traffic failure disrupts 99 Luton airport flights
A preliminary report has been sent to the Secretary of State after a major air traffic failure affected thousands of flights at UK airports – including Luton.
The National Air Traffic Services says the report was sent to the government on Wednesday, September 16.
It follows a technical fault in the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) flight-processing system on Tuesday, September 8.
The disruption began around noon and continued into Wednesday (September 9) as airlines worked to clear the backlog, with around 2,000 flights affected over the two days, according to industry figures.
Luton Airport was among the airports affected, according to data from aviation analyst OAG. It showed 99 scheduled flights at Luton were cancelled between noon and midnight on September 8, including 48 arrivals and 51 departures.
The figures represented 42 per cent of scheduled arrivals and 56 per cent of scheduled departures during that period.
A spokesperson from easyJet, one of the major airlines operating from Luton, said: “Due to the NATS Air Traffic Control system failure, which impacted all airlines’ operations on 8 September, some flights to and from Luton were unable to operate.
“We did everything possible to minimise the impact on our customers and provided those on cancelled flights with options to rebook or receive a refund, securing hotel accommodation where possible, and advising those who make their own travel and accommodation arrangements on how they can be reimbursed.
“The safety of our customers and crew is easyJet’s highest priority.”
The airline also said its flying programme had returned to normal the following day and described this type of disruption as “extremely rare”.
The September incident was the third major NATS-related disruption in recent years, following a much larger flight-planning failure in August 2023 and a radar-related fault in July 2025.
The 2023 failure resulted in more than 1,500 cancellations and affected more than 700,000 passengers, and the July 2025 incident caused more than 160 cancellations.
Flight tracking data found that in the UK easyJet cancelled about 218 services, while British Airways cancelled about 132. Ryanair cancelled 41 and said 65,000 of its passengers had been delayed in the latest incident.
easyJet chief executive Kenton Jervis said: “Airlines have yet again been forced to cancel hundreds of flights, affecting the travel plans of tens of thousands of passengers, due to the third serious NATS technical issue in as many years.
“Despite assurances that lessons had been learned, customers are once again bearing the brunt of NATS’ shortcomings. It simply isn’t good enough.”
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said NATS will provide a technical report on the latest incident, while the government has asked the regulator to carry out an independent review.
The regulator said passengers affected by the NATS outage are unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations directly caused by the incident because they are likely to be classed as “extraordinary circumstances”.
Martin Rolfe, NATS CEO, confirmed the incident was unrelated to the major system outage in August 2023 and dismissed speculation that it was caused by military intervention.
“This was a software issue in a specific part of our flight data system, that we have traced to a small subsection of coding,” he said. “The issue has been identified and mitigation is in place while a permanent fix is safety tested and deployed.”
He added: “I would like to apologise again, very sincerely, to everyone who was affected last week. It’s our job to get people where they want to go, quickly and without delay and we are devastated when that goes wrong. However, our primary role is to keep our skies safe, and everyone who flies through them. At no point was safety in question.”
A London Luton Airport spokesperson said: “Although operations at London Luton Airport resumed within a few hours, there was also a knock-on impact as airlines worked hard to recover their schedules. Contingency measures to support passengers were in place throughout, as NATS worked to resolve the nationwide system outage. This included the deployment of extra staff to assist across all areas of the terminal.
"Once again, we are sorry to those affected and thank them for their patience.”