UK flights grounded as air traffic control glitch sparks hundreds of cancellations

Tens of thousands of passengers were affected by flight cancellations and delays of up to eight hours, with passengers stranded on tarmacs and forced to rebook journeys.

On a Tuesday afternoon in September, a fault in the software that feeds flight plans to British air traffic controllers brought the UK's skies to a near standstill — a reminder of how entirely modern movement depends on invisible systems, and how swiftly their failure cascades into human disruption. Nearly a thousand flights were cancelled or delayed, tens of thousands of passengers were stranded, and Heathrow, one of the world's great crossroads, ran out of room to hold the planes that had nowhere to go. The incident is not merely a story of technical failure, but of the fragility woven into

UK flights grounded as air traffic control glitch sparks hundreds of cancellations

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