Air India flights were among those cancelled on Tuesday after a technical failure struck the UK’s National Air Traffic Services.
The failure resulted in more than 1,000 flight cancellations across the UK on Tuesday, with a further 177 flights cancelled for Wednesday.
Heathrow was the most severely affected airport, along with Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol.
Air India said the technical issue forced it to divert, delay or cancel multiple flights to and from UK airports.
NATS confirmed the system had returned to normal operation, though it warned that clearing the network backlog would take time.
Air India was among several international carriers, alongside UK domestic airlines, affected by the disruption at Heathrow and other British airports.
Passengers travelling to and from the UK were advised to check their flight status directly with airlines given the scale and unpredictability of the disruption.
NATS, formerly known as National Air Traffic Services, is the primary air traffic control provider for UK airspace, handling flight data processing for arrivals and departures across the country’s busiest airports.
September is a peak month for Indian student travel to the UK, meaning the timing of the outage was particularly disruptive for passengers flying to British universities for the new academic term.
NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe said the exact cause of the technical failure was still being investigated, though the system was confirmed to be operating normally again after the fix.
The Civil Aviation Authority was expected to seek a detailed report from NATS on the incident, given the scale of disruption it caused across the network.
Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Luton, Edinburgh and Bristol airports all reported disrupted flight operations during the outage, with Heathrow the most severely affected.
NATS said recovery from the backlog across the aviation network would take time even after the underlying technical issue was resolved.
London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, Wikimedia Commons, CC0
