LONDON, 8 September 2026 (Nosheen): Some departing flights at major British airports were disrupted on Tuesday after air traffic control provider NATS experienced a technical issue, with Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted among the airports affected by restrictions and delays. NATS said in a statement that it had identified the problem as being in its flight processing system, adding that its engineers were on site and working urgently to restore normal operations as quickly as possible. The air traffic control provider said flights were still departing and British airspace remained open, but warned that recovery would take some time. Heathrow, Britain’s biggest aviation hub, said it was working with NATS to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. Edinburgh Airport said in a post on X that the issue could affect its operations, while Ireland’s Dublin Airport also reported that flights departing from and arriving at the airport were being affected. Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 said on social media that arrivals and departures were being heavily regulated at airports in the London Flight Information Region because of the technical issue. The disruption is the latest problem to affect Britain’s air traffic control systems. In 2024, Britain’s aviation regulator said NATS needed to review its contingency plans for outages after the automatic processing of flight plans malfunctioned a year earlier, causing widespread disruption across British airports. Airline bosses said that incident had cost them more than £100 million in refunds and compensation. In July last year, a radar-related technical issue in Britain’s air traffic control system disrupted flights for more than four hours at major airports in London and elsewhere, including Heathrow.