The head of air traffic control provider Nats is being summoned to meet the Transport Secretary after a technical glitch grounded flights across the UK, disrupting thousands of passengers. Heidi Alexander said she will meet with Martin Rolfe to "understand what happened and how we can prevent reoccurrence" following more than 150 flight cancellations on Wednesday.
Airlines have demanded answers after thousands of passengers attempting to fly in and out of the country faced major disruption. Airports saw 84 departures and 71 arrivals cancelled as of 10pm on Wednesday, with the highest number of cancellations at London's Heathrow Airport.
Nats chief faces pressure
A number of inbound flights were also diverted to European cities as the chaos unfolded. In a post on X on Thursday morning, Alexander said that "Nats are working closely with airlines and airports to clear the backlog safely and look after passengers".
The "technical issue" responsible for the disruption was at Nats's control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire, according to the company. It first announced problems at around 4pm on Wednesday, and in an update an hour later said systems were fully operational and that departures had resumed at all airports.
Ryanair demands resignation
Ryanair called on Rolfe to resign in the wake of the fault, claiming "no lessons have been learnt" since the August 2023 system outage. The airline's chief operating officer Neal McMahon said: "It is outrageous that passengers are once again being hit with delays and disruption due to Martin Rolfe's continued mismanagement of Nats."
Business minister Gareth Thomas was asked whether Rolfe will be "fired" over the incident. He told Times Radio: "We are summoning - the Transport Secretary (Heidi Alexander) is summoning - in today the chief executive of of Nats to help us get to the bottom of what went wrong yesterday."
Previous incident raises concerns
Thomas acknowledged that "an incident happened two years ago and measures were taken then". He added: "It looks like those measures weren't enough but we need to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, and conversations will take place today."
A former industry chief has said that it is "unrealistic" to expect an air traffic management system where there is no technical failure. Graham Lake, former director-general of air traffic management industry association Canso, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "If you look at the minutes of outage over a period of years, your availability - system availability - is, frankly, very, very good."
Quick recovery praised
Lake defended the response time, saying: "So, I think it's unrealistic to expect a system where you have no technical failure." He added: "The failure yesterday was short and sweet, if you like, the recovery was quick - aircraft were operating again very, very quickly."
(PA) Note: This article has been edited with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
