Flights grounded for four hours at Edinburgh Airport due to ‘IT issue’

All flights were grounded at Edinburgh Airport for around four hours on Sunday afternoon and evening due to an IT issue with air-traffic control.

The failure is believed to have begun at about 2.30pm, forcing at least a dozen inbound planes to be diverted to Glasgow, Newcastle and Manchester, from locations including Istanbul, Gran Canaria and Tenerife.

At least 22 flights were cancelled, to destinations including Amsterdam, Cologne and Berlin. Around 5,000 passengers have had flights cancelled or diverted.

In a post on X, Edinburgh Airport said that “no flights are currently taking off or landing” due to an “IT issue with air-traffic control”.

The airport added: “Engineers are working to resolve the issue. Passengers should check their flight status with their airline before travelling to the airport.”

Departures resumed at 6.42pm, with a Ryanair flight to Cork taking off four hours behind schedule. Disruption continued for the rest of the evening and into Monday morning with aircraft, crew and passengers out of position.

The most-delayed plane was a Ryanair flight to Milan Bergamo, which was six-and-a-half hours late and arrived at its destination at 4am.

According to the flight data specialist, Cirium, Edinburgh Airport was expected to see 303 flights on Sunday (152 departing and 151 arriving) – equating to over 50,000 seats.

Edinburgh is Scotland’s busiest airport, handling around 40,000 passengers per day.

Air-traffic control at the airport is handled by Air Navigation Solutions Ltd (ANSL). This is a competitor to Nats, the main UK air-traffic control provider, which suffered a nationwide failure of both its main and back-up systems on 28 August 2023.

A spokesperson for ANSL said of the failure: “We have determined that it related to a new element of our systems at Edinburgh Airport. A full investigation is being conducted to determine the exact cause of this issue.

“Our engineers were working on-site at pace to fix an issue on a new element of one of our systems. Safety is our number one priority, and this time was required to ensure that our systems were operating robustly and effectively before they were brought back to service

“When the problem occurred, the time was taken to ensure that our systems operate robustly and are stable before operations were recommenced. A comprehensive investigation is now under way to ensure this issue does not happen again.”

Many of the passengers affected by cancellations were seeking to connect to intercontinental flights at airports including London Heathrow, Istanbul, Paris and Amsterdam.

The first Monday morning Edinburgh-Paris departure on Air France was cancelled because of the disruption.

Under air passengers’ rights rules, all travellers whose flights are cancelled are entitled to be flown to their final destination as soon as possible, including on a rival carrier, and provided with meals and, if necessary, accommodation, while they wait.