NATS Holdings

The organisation was originally set up as the National Air Traffic Control Services (NATCS) in 1962, bringing together responsibility for the UK's existing military and civil air traffic control services.

The organisation became National Air Traffic Services (NATS) when the responsibility for sponsoring the civil air traffic service component was transferred to the newly formed Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in 1972. Before this it had no legal existence – all contracts were with the CAA or MoD.

Until its establishment as a separate company, the leadership of NATS (the "Controller") alternated between civil and military, the latter normally a serving air marshal. The first controller was Sir Laurence Sinclair, exceptionally a retired air vice marshal. NATS staff were drawn from and paid by, the CAA and the MoD.

In 1992 it was recognised by the Government that as a service provider, NATS should be operated at some distance from its regulator, the CAA. Although debated, it was decided that NATS should not be privatised at that time. NATS was re-organised into a limited company on 1 April 1996 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of the CAA. The direct involvement of military officers in the management of NATS ended at that time, although the last military controller, Air Marshal Sir Thomas Stonor, had retired in 1991.

In 1998, a public-private partnership was proposed. This was written into the Transport Act 2000 and in 2001 51% of NATS was transferred to the private sector. However, due to the decline in air traffic following the 11 September 2001 attacks an additional investment of £130m was required, £65m coming each from the UK government and BAA, which received 4% of the company in return.

As a public-private partnership the UK government holds 49% and a golden share, with 42% held by the Airline Group, 5% by NATS staff, and 4% by UK airport operator LHR Airports Ltd.

NATS headquarters is located at Whiteley, Fareham, in Hampshire, England.

In 2025 it handled 2,536,156 flights in UK airspace, an increase of 2.7% year-on-year since 2019. It was its busiest year since 2019 with its busiest day, 18 July, seeing 8,340 flights.

En-route control centres

There are two control locations in the UK operated by NERL:

London Area Control Centre and London Terminal Control Centre at Swanwick in Hampshire control both upper level en-route traffic across England and Wales up to the Scottish border and low-level traffic around London and South East England, including aircraft making approaches to the main London airports.

The Prestwick Centre, Ayrshire, is home to the Scottish Area Control Centre (including, since January 2010, the former Manchester Area Control Centre), which controls traffic over Scotland, Northern Ireland, and up to FL285 over the northern half of England, and the Prestwick Oceanic Area Control Centre which provides a procedural control service for traffic crossing the North Atlantic via the Shanwick Oceanic Control Area.

Notable incidents

It failed on several occasions between January and September 2002 for various reasons.

From 15 to 20 April 2010, under internationally agreed guidelines that require a zero tolerance approach to ash, NATS placed a series of restrictions on aircraft operating in UK controlled airspace owing to the potential dangers caused by a volcanic ash cloud from the eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, in cooperation with the Met Office, CAA and UK government.

On 12 December 2014, from 15:30 until 16:30, traffic flow throughout the London airspace was restricted due to a computer system failure at NATS. At 15:30 an announcement was made by Eurocontrol that "There has been a failure of the flight data computer server at London ACC [area control centre]." At 16:30 the airspace was reopened, however it remained restricted with some landing flights being turned away. NATS reported that the failure was due to a single faulty line of software source code. The failure was examined in the House of Commons Transport Select Committee on 17 December 2014.

On 28 August 2023 NATS suffered a major technical incident, caused by receipt of a flight plan containing duplicate codes for different navigation beacons, that caused severe delays. It occurred on the busiest day of the year. The incident lasted approximately 3 hours, but caused extensive knock-on delays. 790 flights departing UK airports and 785 flights arriving into UK airports were cancelled, representing about 27% of all flights. The following day at least 281 flights were cancelled.

A major radar failure at the Swanwick centre caused heavy disruption on 30 July 2025.

On 8 September 2026, technical issues with NATS caused major disruption at several UK airports including London Heathrow Airport and London Stansted Airport, resulting in some 349 British Airways flights being cancelled, and others diverted to airports including Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, Amsterdam Schiphol Airport and Brussels Airport. A further 291 flights are also cancelled the next day. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said she did "not believe the issue was unavoidable" and gave chief executive, Martin Rolfe, a week to report back on the reasons for the technical failure. A preliminary report, published on 18 September, said the incident was caused by a defect in software which allocates codes to individual aircraft when manual requests are made. It stated: "While a manual request for an aircraft code was being processed, the system received a message for a higher priority activity which resulted in the aircraft code request being paused. When processing of the aircraft code request resumed, the software defect meant it did not resume correctly and the resulting output was corrupted, and affected some subsequent flight data updates. This happened in the space of a millisecond."