Does Britain have the worst air travel delays in Europe?

On Monday a ‘connectivity issue’ at the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) centre in Prestwick caused flight delays and more than 150 cancellations. It came just two weeks after a systems failure at Nats’s Swanwick control centre caused more than 2,000 cancellations over two days. The latest failure happened despite robust ‘mitigation plans’ put in place in September – and the implementation (by Nats, airlines and airports) of 34 recommendations from the CAA after a Nats software problem three years ago saw 1,600 flights delayed and 700,000 passengers affected by delays or cancellations. Ryanair’s chief operating officer Neal McMahon called for the head of Nats’s head, saying: ‘Enough is enough. Martin Rolfe should resign today.’

The 8 September outage was caused by a software defect; during the one millisecond that one plane was being assigned an identifying code, the computer system got an instruction to undertake a higher-priority activity, leading to corrupted data and the need to reboot systems, limiting air traffic while that happened. The 2023 failure was traced to software baulking when it was given a flight plan with two identically named waypoints thousands of miles apart.

Although these incidents caused travel misery for thousands of people, Nats’s failures barely register when compared with air traffic control-caused delays recorded across Europe. The International Air Transport Association’s analysis of delays in Europe caused by air navigation service providers found that Nats was responsible for just 4 per cent of the minutes of delay recorded between 2015 and 2025, compared with 33 per cent for France’s strike-prone DSNA and 19 per cent for Germany’s DFS. Nats controlled about 8 per cent of flight hours under consideration, DSNA 14 per cent and DFS 9 per cent. 

Between 2016 and 2025, Nats’s equipment caused around 122,000 minutes of delay compared to 322,700 from Germany’s DFS and 832,000 from France’s DSNA – which still relies on pieces of paper for arrivals, according to data from Eurocontrol. DSNA was recently criticised in a French Senate report for still relying on pieces of paper for arriving flights, relying on obsolete radio systems and until recently operating a system of ‘clairances’ where controllers would simply skip their shifts with no recording and no repercussions.  

While Nats’s performance here looks impressive, the numbers available don’t tell the whole story: they don’t cover the Atlantic, cover delays en-route – and do not count cancellations, only delays to flights that actually took off. That means incidents like the one in August 2023 barely register, not because it wasn’t bad but because so many flights were cancelled rather than being delayed.