Ryanair calls UK air traffic control boss an “overpaid failure” as passengers face travel chaos
Key Points
- An ATC system failure has disrupted hundreds of flights and tens of thousands of passengers in the UK.
- The issue is now resolved, NATS says, but recovery from the disruption will take significantly longer.
- Ryanair has called on NATS CEO Martin Rolfe to quit, calling him an 'overpaid failure'.
Thousands of airline passengers flying into and out of the United Kingdom have seen their travel plans descend into chaos due to air traffic control failures this week.
On Tuesday 8 September, the system run by National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the UK’s air traffic control authority, experienced a significant failure that has left thousands stranded and caused flights to be grounded across the country.
While NATS has said it is recovering from this disruption, restoring normal service to airlines and getting through the backlog of stranded passengers will take significantly longer.
Flight delays and disruption to air travel is expected to continue as airlines try to recover from this collapse of the NATS system.
“Work is continuing to assist airlines and airports recover from today’s disruption,” NATS said in a technical update on Tuesday night.
“This has been a very complex recovery and has created difficulties for the whole aviation network, from which it will take time to recover. We apologise again for the disruption caused.”
Ryanair calls for NATS CEO to resign
UK airlines have pointed blame directly at leadership failures at NATS, with Ryanair COO Neal McMahon calling for the organisation’s CEO Martin Rolfe to quit.
Ryanair said that as a result of “yet another UK ATC system failure”, more than 65,000 of its passengers experienced disruption and it was forced to cancel over 50 scheduled flights.
This ATC disruption follows just three years after another collapse of the NATS system in August 2023, since which ATC charges in the UK have increased substantially.
“How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe, accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns?” McMahon said.
“Over three years after NATS’ catastrophic 2023 system meltdown, it’s clear that nothing has changed, with UK passengers once again suffering avoidable ATC delays of up to 8 hours today due a critical NATS ATC system failing.”
“The astonishing part is that NATS continues to charge airlines and passengers more each year while delivering a worse service. Following the 2023 collapse, we were told lessons would be learned. We were told ‘resilience would improve’. We were told the systems had been fixed. Yet here we are again,” he said.
“This is a pattern of repeated failure with Rolfe in charge getting paid over £1.4m in bonuses p.a. while he delivers failure after failure.”
