Andy Burnham has called for a full investigation into the UK’s latest air traffic control failure after at least 227 flights were cancelled and thousands of passengers faced disruption.
Technical fault at NATS centre
The Prime Minister described the issue as “serious” after a technical fault at a National Air Traffic Services (NATS) centre in Scotland caused delays and cancellations across the UK on September 21. It was the second major NATS outage in two weeks, prompting Ryanair to call for chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign.
The worst disruption was reported at airports in Scotland and Northern Ireland, including Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast International.
Ryanair demands resignation
Ryanair said more than 140 of its own flights had been delayed on Monday, affecting more than 25,000 passengers.
Speaking to the press on his way to New York, Mr Burnham said the failures needed to be fully investigated but declined to say whether Mr Rolfe should lose his job.
Asked if he would sack the head of NATS, Mr Burnham said: "Well these are clearly serious issues and they need to be fully investigated, and I know the Transport Secretary is taking these issues extremely seriously."
Further issues today do cause even greater concern, but initially this is a matter for the Transport Secretary to get to the bottom of what is behind this and why there has been a recurrence.
Airlines question NATS resilience
Ryanair’s chief operations officer, Neal McMahon, called for Mr Rolfe to resign. He said: “Martin Rolfe has presided over repeated system failures, repeated passenger disruption and repeated failures to deliver an effective back-up system.
“Enough is enough. Martin Rolfe should resign today.”
EasyJet, the airline which reportedly saw the most flights affected by today’s issues, said the latest disruption “calls into question the resilience of NATS' systems", and demanded "firm actions to prevent these repeated failures".
Meanwhile, Wizz Air questioned the risk of further failures, asking “which part of the country will be next?” and “how many hidden weaknesses remain?”
Connectivity issue fixed but delays continue
NATS reported a problem at its Prestwick centre in Scotland on Monday morning, but said it was “unrelated” to the September 8 incident that saw more than 2,000 flights cancelled. It later said a “connectivity issue” within its systems network was to blame and that the fault had been fixed.
Despite the fix, knock-on delays and cancellations continued throughout the day, leaving passengers stranded.
The Civil Aviation Authority said travellers caught up in Monday’s disruption were “unlikely to be entitled to compensation”, as the technical issue was likely to be considered an “extraordinary circumstance” outside airlines’ control. However, airlines were still required to look after affected passengers.
