(Sept 21): Parts of the airspace in the UK are facing disruptions after an equipment failure over Scotland and Northern England impacted some domestic and westbound trans-Atlantic flights on Monday, just weeks after technical issues caused chaos across the country.

The UK’s National Air Traffic Services, which operates UK airspace, said it was dealing with an unspecified issue at its operation centre in Prestwick in Scotland.

The equipment malfunction is being caused by a failure to process flight data, according to Eurocontrol, the European Union’s air traffic manager body, and disruption will last until 2pm London time.

IAG SA-owned British Airways and EasyJet plc confirmed that they’ve experienced some delays.

“Yet another technical fault with NATS means some of our customers are likely to experience disruption to their travel plans today,” British Airways said in a statement.

EasyJet said separately that this “once again calls into question the resilience of NATS’ systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures.”

The latest failure is unrelated to an issue from two weeks ago on Sept 8, which was caused by a software defect and caused widespread delays and cancellations.

Prestwick is situated west of Glasgow in Scotland. The disruptions meant that some traffic going through Edinburgh, Glasgow and into Belfast in Ireland experienced delays. Scotland is also a key trajectory route for flights across the Atlantic. Manchester Airport also suffered delays and some cancellations, according to data compiled by Cirium.

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