British airlines criticize authorities after 2nd air traffic control incident in 2 weeks

British airlines on Monday criticized the country's air traffic control provider after a new technical fault disrupted flights, the second such incident in less than two weeks, reported Xinhua.

National Air Traffic Services (NATS) said the problem occurred at its Prestwick center in Scotland, causing delays to flights heading north and those departing Scottish airports. Airports in Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England were among those affected. NATS said the latest fault was unrelated to the technical problems earlier this month.

British Airways called the latest incident "disappointing," saying some customers were likely to face disruption. EasyJet questioned "the resilience of NATS' systems" and called for firm action to prevent repeated failures.

Ryanair said more than 140 of its flights had been delayed, affecting over 25,000 passengers, and renewed its call for NATS Chief Executive Martin Rolfe to resign.

The latest disruption came less than two weeks after a major NATS outage on Sept. 8 led to more than 2,000 flight cancellations and affected hundreds of thousands of passengers. NATS said in a preliminary report released Friday that the earlier incident was caused by a software defect that produced corrupted data "in the space of a millisecond."

British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has described the earlier disruption as "completely unacceptable," while the Civil Aviation Authority is conducting an independent review.