India, Sept. 12 -- A single military flight plan may have brought Britain's aviation network to a standstill this week, exposing serious questions about the resilience of the UK's air traffic control system. More than 2,000 flights were cancelled after a NATS system shut down for around four hours on Tuesday, September 8, disrupting hundreds of thousands of passengers and triggering delays, diversions and airport chaos across the country.

The incident has now taken a new turn after a Financial Times report said a UK military aircraft submitted "spurious" flight data that triggered a wider failure in NATS' flight-processing system. Four people briefed on the incident said the flight plan set off a chain of events that eventually forced th...