London flights resume after tech outage causes brief chaos

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(Bloomberg) — London flights began resuming their service on Wednesday afternoon after a technical glitch at a key air-traffic control center forced authorities to temporarily limit the number of movements into the UK capital.

Operations at Heathrow, the biggest airport in the UK, came back after a brief disruption to takeoffs and landings, while Gatwick airport nearby also said normal service resumed. Engineers at the NATS Swanwick site, a major facility for air-traffic control in the UK, restored the system after a fault in the afternoon and were “in the process of resuming normal operations in the London area,” the service said.

“We continue to work closely with airline and airport customers to minimize disruption,” NATS said in a statement.

The outage hit air traffic during the busiest summer holiday period, hobbling flights for airlines including British Airways and discount specialist Easyjet Plc. The latest fault follows a full-day outage at Heathrow airport in March after a fire at a substation cut electricity supply to the sprawling hub.

The glitch on Wednesday spread more widely, with Manchester and Birmingham airports in the North also reporting groundings. London City Airport, which specializes in smaller aircraft that are popular with corporate travellers, was also affected.

Two years ago, the UK airspace shut down because of an air traffic control system glitch. The issue was fixed after a few hours but caused heavy disruption to departures and arrivals across the country.

The Swanwick operations room manages the en-route airspace over England and Wales up to the Scottish border as well as lower-altitude traffic to and from London’s airports.

The center, which was inaugurated in 2002, and on which Lockheed Martin Corp. was prime contractor, was designed to give NATS 30% more capacity, helping it handle 3 million flights a year by 2020 from about 2 million when it opened.