Airline bosses have spoken about the serious and widespread disruption that continues today
A Ryanair jet
Ryanair has been forced to cancel 250 flights with costs to the company expected to “run into the millions”, the airline’s chief operations officer has said while Wizz Air said 10,000 passengers face ‘serious disruption’. Widespread disruption continues on Wednesday with hundreds of flights cancelled following a technical issue.
Flight monitoring website Flightradar24 said 1,300 flights to and from UK airports were axed on Tuesday after a system issue hit Nats, the National Air Traffic Service, which provides air traffic control services to 15 UK airports. Tens of thousands of passengers were caught up in the chaos, which continued on Wednesday with further cancellations and delays expected as airlines deal with the knock-on impacts at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted.
According to FlightRadar, 246 flights had been cancelled at Heathrow Airport by 6am on Wednesday, while Gatwick passengers faced 33 cancellations. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander is set to speak with Nats boss Martin Rolfe on Wednesday before she addresses MPs in the Commons.
Ryanair said more than 65,000 of its passengers had been disrupted and it had cancelled more than 50 scheduled flights. British Airways (BA) said it was forced to cancel or divert more than 100 flights on Tuesday which had impacted “tens of thousands of customers”.
Neal McMahon, Ryanair’s chief operating officer, called on Mr Rolfe to resign, saying: “How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure Nats CEO Martin Rolfe accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns? Over three years after Nats’ catastrophic 2023 system meltdown, it’s clear that nothing has changed, with UK passengers once again suffering avoidable ATC (air traffic control) delays of up to eight hours today due a critical Nats ATC system failing.”
Mr McMahon said: “Airlines across the UK cancelled over a thousand flights, and hundreds of thousands of people were disrupted because the lessons learned for the previous failures have not been delivered by Martin Rolfe.”
Asked what he thought the cost to Ryanair would be following the incident, Mr McMahon said: “It’ll run into the millions.” He added: “We have crews everywhere and it’s a real shambles because we couldn’t get our aircraft where they were meant to be yesterday. We had 250 flights cancelled, so really, really disruptive for us.”
The managing director of Wizz Air UK said there are “serious questions about the resilience” of the UK’s air traffic control service. Yvonne Moynihan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We had 24 cancellations yesterday and over 21 other flights that were disrupted with long-term delays.
“So that’s over 10,000 passengers coming in and out of London have had major disruption.”
Ms Moynihan added: “This is now the third time that we have had an air traffic control failure, and during the peak period as well. So major questions need to be asked There are serious questions about the resilience of this system.”
Asked whether Nats’ chief executive Martin Rolfe should consider resigning, Ms Moynihan said: “I think in any industry, when you’ve had three failures, you need to consider that three strikes and you’re out. So I think it’s certainly something that he needs to look at.”
She added: “A third time and a third excuse is not enough anymore.”
Mr Rolfe apologised for the issue but dodged questions over whether he would resign. He said: “Inevitably, things do go wrong in complex systems. We never want them to. We always hope they won’t, but we absolutely plan for them to and make sure we handle them properly.”
Mr Rolfe added: “I would say the UK has one of the best reputations in the world for its air traffic control service, both from a safety perspective and from a resilience perspective. Nats was actually a partial privatisation 25 years ago, and since that point, it’s had access to funding.
“We’ve invested way more than a billion in technology over that time, our service has consistently improved. Our safety is consistently improved from a very good base. But all of those things don’t detract from the fact that when these things happen, it is disappointing and upsetting, for which I apologise.”
On the cause of the problem, Mr Rolfe said a “thorough” investigation would take place, but ruled out a cyber attack. He added: “My focus and that of the team has been on both getting our system operating back up normally, which it is now, but there’s obviously a huge tail to the disruption and we’ll be working on that through the course of today.
“And then our attention will turn to exactly what’s happened in this particular incident. What I will say is, I don’t believe we’ve ever seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation.”
