UK summons air traffic boss after major outage as flights slowly resume

Flights from British airports resumed on Wednesday after a major air traffic failure, but questions mounted about ‌the reliability of Britain's aviation systems and ministers called in the flight control boss to explain the shutdown.

The hours-long outage on Tuesday, which resulted in the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights and left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded, has ramped up pressure on air traffic control provider NATS and ​its boss Martin Rolfe.

Ryanair said around 150,000 of its passengers had been affected on Tuesday and it cancelled more than 200 flights, while British Airways said it had cancelled or diverted 100 flights with tens of ⁠thousands impacted.