The head of Britain’s air traffic control provider is on the brink of resigning, with chaos across UK airports set to last for days.
Mass delays and the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights, which has left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded, have ramped up pressure on Nats and its boss Martin Rolfe.
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Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, has been calling for Mr Rolfe to resign since 2023, while Wizz Air’s UK managing director also said he should consider his position.
When asked whether he would quit, Mr Rolfe said there would be “lots of time for that later”, but his focus now was on making sure the problem was solved.”
Ryanair’s Chief Executive told Times Radio: “Nats told us it was a flight planning processing failure, which is exactly the same issue that happened in 2023.
“If you remember, in 2023 there was an issue with a flight plan, and it sent the system in a in a loop that eventually caused it to shut down.
“We’re told that that was a rogue flight plan and we’re told yesterday this was a spurious flight plan which caused the same outage and our question is like: these things can happen, but where’s the backup systems?”
He added: “The failing is that the backup system was unable to kick in and work, like it’s not a backup system if it shuts down. That’s the definition of a backup is that when the primary system goes down, that you can revert and keep going.”
Mr Rolfe, who apologised to those affected by the issue, denied Britain was worse than other countries and said the country’s air traffic service was well regarded from a safety and resilience perspective.
“We have, at this point, ruled out cyber (attacks),” Mr Rolfe told the BBC when asked about the cause, adding he believed it would be different to previous outages.
More to follow…
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