UK air cargo operations are facing disruption after flights were disrupted due to technical issues with air traffic control systems.
Yesterday, UK air traffic controller NATS’ flight processing system faced issues which have since been fixed.
Around 1,700 flights were cancelled yesterday, and while operations have been recovering, there were more cancellations today, with around 150 flights already cancelled.
“This has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover,” NATS said in a statement issued last night.
Heathrow, Gatwick and East Midlands Airport were amongst the airports affected by the issues.
Virgin Atlantic Cargo said flights were expected to operate as normal today, although there may be some disruption to shipments.
“While the technical issue affecting the NATS air traffic control system has now been resolved, recovery across the wider aviation industry is ongoing.
“Virgin Atlantic expects to operate its planned flying programme on Wednesday 9 September, although some shipments will continue to experience disruption as a result of the outage on Tuesday 8 September.”
The cargo business added that teams are prioritising rebooking impacted shipments and customers should check its track and trace system or the latest status update.
According to data from Rotate, outbound international cargo capacity from London Heathrow fell to 2,500 tonnes yesterday compared with 4,200 tonnes a week earlier.
Stansted’s outbound international cargo capacity dropped to 798 tonnes against 1,000 tonnes on 1 September, and at East Midlands there was a fall to 1,200 tonnes from 1,400 tonnes.
Gatwick Airport said that it anticipated that it would take time for its operations to fully return to normal.
Heathrow said that disruption would continue as airlines need to reposition aircraft and crew.
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