Ryanair has called for the resignation of NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe after the air traffic control fault that disrupted flights at Heathrow and other UK airports on Tuesday, with Wizz Air also demanding reform and the Civil Aviation Authority saying it will review the incident.
The fault, in NATS's flight processing system at its Swanwick control centre, halted departures across the network from around 12:48pm and led to hundreds of cancellations and delays through the afternoon and evening, with Heathrow arrivals restricted until 10pm as the network recovered. NATS said a fix was implemented but that full recovery would take time.
According to Reuters, Ryanair said more than 65,000 of its passengers were affected by delays of up to eight hours and that it had cancelled more than 50 flights. Ryanair chief operating officer Neal McMahon said: "How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe, accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns?" Wizz Air said a "critical national infrastructure provider should not repeatedly bring the aviation system to a standstill," calling NATS "simply not fit for purpose in its current form."
The Civil Aviation Authority said it would expect NATS to share a full report of Tuesday's incident and would then consider whether further steps are needed to secure the reliability of the UK's air traffic control system.