‘Technical issue’ with radar halts arrivals at Birmingham Airport
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A power outage at a National Air Traffic Service’s (NATS) radar site has halted arrivals to Birmingham Airport.
NATS has apologised for the disruption and said the outage was caused by poor weather in the area. They added that their engineers were working with National Grid to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Nine flights have been cancelled or diverted at the airport, with at least 12 due to be delayed – several flights have delays of over four hours.
A spokesperson said: “Due to a technical issue with NATS’ radar that serves Birmingham Airport, only departing flights are currently operating, with some delays.
“All arriving flights are currently suspended. We apologise for the delay to customers, and we are working closely with NATS to rectify the issue.”
Multiple flights have been diverted to East Midlands Airport and Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport.
Several easyJet flights have been cancelled or diverted. Pic: Reuters
Previous incidents
This isn’t the first time a power issue has caused problems for a major UK airport.
Last March, a power outage shut Heathrow Airport, causing travel chaos for more than 270,000 passengers.
A report found that the incident, which led to the cancellation of around 1,300 flights, was caused by a “catastrophic failure” of equipment in a nearby substation.
NATS also came under fire last year, particularly from airlines, when air traffic problems resulted in more than 1,000 flights departing UK airports being cancelled.
Martin Rolfe, the chief executive of NATS, told Sky News an initial investigation found the air traffic control failure was caused by flight data which its system “didn’t understand” and “couldn’t interpret”.
