The UK’s air traffic control network is back under scrutiny after disruption hit some of the country’s busiest airports because of a technical fault. The incident has led to calls from two of Europe’s biggest low-cost carriers, Ryanair and Wizz Air, for a fundamental change at NATS.
Wizz Air said the latest outage revealed broader weaknesses in the durability of the UK’s aviation infrastructure. The airline asked whether NATS can maintain a sufficiently resilient national service, saying an organization responsible for critical national infrastructure should not be able to repeatedly bring significant parts of the country’s air transport network to a halt.
Ryanair has gone one step further calling for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign. “This latest disruption is particularly troubling given the assurances we received following the major air traffic control failure in 2023,” said the airline’s chief operating officer, Neal McMahon.
Following the incident, airlines were told the problems had been fixed and that systems would be hardened to give more resilience. “Now you wonder whether those measures have delivered the level of reliability the industry was promised,” McMahon said of the recurrence of a major technical glitch.
NATS said it had found the cause of the latest problem and put a fix in place. The air traffic control provider said it was working with airlines and airports as operations returned to normal.
The latest disruption also follows ongoing regulatory scrutiny from the 2023 incident. At the time, the automatic processing of flight plans had failed, causing widespread cancelations and delays across the UK.
That disruption prompted the Civil Aviation Authority to state in 2024 that NATS has to review its contingency plans for possible system outages. The regulator has now confirmed it has been in contact with NATS over the latest failure.
The CAA is expecting a full report from NATS “setting out the incident”. The regulator will consider if further action is needed to safeguard the reliability and safety of the UK’s air traffic control network once the findings have been looked into.
