The boss of the UK's main air traffic control has ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of national disruption to flights on Tuesday. Flight monitoring website Flightradar24 said 1,300 flights had been cancelled to and from UK airports on Tuesday, September 8, after a system issue hit NATS, the National Air Traffic Service, which provides air traffic control services to 15 UK airports.
Airports affected and recovery
Flights were grounded at Liverpool John Lennon Airport (LJLA) and Manchester Airport, among others, as NATS reported a technical issue. LJLA said the issue would affect some services, with one departure and two arrivals cancelled on Wednesday morning. Manchester Airport confirmed it was dealing with delays and cancellations in a statement on Tuesday afternoon before the issue was resolved later in the day.
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 impact 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.
NATS boss apologises and rules out cyber attack
Speaking to the BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, 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.”
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.”
Airlines report impact and calls for resignation
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, impacting “tens of thousands of customers”.
Mr Rolfe has been under fire from Wizz Air and Ryanair after the latest issue, which saw some passengers trapped on planes on runways for hours. 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?”
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander is set to speak with NATS boss Martin Rolfe on Wednesday before she addresses MPs in the Commons for the second reading of the Civil Aviation Bill. Discussing the response to Tuesday's incident, Mr Rolfe said: “We had everybody on site, everybody was in the right place. We had all the engineers in place. We had our various partners from software industries and so on all on hand. So this was resolved as quickly as it could be, but within the limits of making sure that it all stayed safe.”
