Birmingham Airport Outage Halts Arrivals, Diverts Flights

A power outage triggered by severe weather disrupted operations at Birmingham Airport on Sunday evening, January 11, halting all incoming flights and forcing diversions for dozens of aircraft bound for the West Midlands hub.

The incident, which began around 7:45 p.m., stemmed from a failure in the radar system operated by National Air Traffic Services (NATS), caused by a power disruption at a nearby National Grid facility. Officials attributed the outage to lingering effects of Storm Goretti, which had battered the region earlier in the week with wind gusts nearing 100 miles per hour and prompted a rare red weather warning from the Met Office. Only outbound flights continued from the airport, though many faced delays exceeding four hours. Arrivals resumed in the early hours of Monday morning after engineers from NATS and National Grid restored the radar by late Sunday.

At least 12 inbound flights were diverted to alternative airports, including East Midlands, Liverpool John Lennon, Bristol, Manchester, and Stansted. Specific diversions included a Jet2 flight from Gran Canaria to Liverpool, Ryanair services from Dublin and Murcia also to Liverpool, an easyJet from Marrakech to...