Thousands of passengers trying to fly both in and out of the country faced major disruption on Wednesday afternoon.
UK airports saw 84 departures and 71 arrivals cancelled as of 10pm on Wednesday – with the highest number of cancellations at London’s Heathrow Airport – while a number of inbound flights were also diverted to European cities, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
EasyJet’s chief operating officer David Morgan said: “It’s extremely disappointing to see an ATC failure once again causing disruption to our customers at this busy and important time of year for travel.
“While our priority today is supporting our customers, we will want to understand from Nats what steps they are taking to ensure issues don’t continue.”
Ryanair called for Nats’ chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign in the wake of the fault, claiming “no lessons have been learnt” since the August 2023 system outage.
The airline’s chief operating officer Neal McMahon said: “It is outrageous that passengers are once again being hit with delays and disruption due to Martin Rolfe’s continued mismanagement of Nats.
“It is clear that no lessons have been learnt since the August 2023 Nats system outage, and passengers continue to suffer as a result of Martin Rolfe’s incompetence.”
More than 700,000 passengers suffered disruption when flights were grounded at UK airports on August 28 2023 when Nats suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.
Mr McMahon continued: “If Nats CEO Martin Rolfe fails to resign on the back of this latest Nats system outage that has disrupted thousands of passengers yet again, then UK transport minister Heidi Alexander must act without delay to remove Martin Rolfe and deliver urgent reform of Nats’ shambolic ATC service, so that airlines and passengers are no longer forced to endure these preventable delays caused by persistent Nats failures.”
The Department for Transport (DfT) noted that the Transport Secretary does not have any direct control over Nats and has no powers on staffing decisions.
Nats has been contacted for comment.
The Liberal Democrats called for a full investigation into the glitch.
The party’s leader Sir Ed Davey said: “It is utterly unacceptable that after a major disruption just two years ago, air traffic control has once again been hit by a technical fault.
“The Government should launch an urgent investigation to ensure the system is fit for purpose, including ruling out hostile action as a cause.”
A DfT spokesperson said the department is “working closely” with Nats to understand the cause of the glitch and the “implications for the resilience systems in place”.
The “technical issue” responsible for the disruption was at Nats’ control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire, according to the company.
It first announced problems at around 4pm on Wednesday, and in an update an hour later said systems were fully operational and that departures had resumed at all airports.
John Carr, a chiropodist from Stourbridge, was on his way to Norway with a group of friends to help set up his brother’s wedding, for which he is best man, when he found out after checking in that his flight was cancelled.
The 35-year-old told the PA news agency at Heathrow Airport: “I’m pretty gutted. We’ve got loads of stuff in the suitcases to set up the venue, because we’re obviously flying to Norway. We’ve got the wedding rehearsal to do. It’s quite stressful.”
He said they did not receive any warning of the cancellation before it happened.
“We had no idea,” Mr Carr told PA.
“There was nothing that the airport had said out on the speaker phones, or anything like that. There was no warning from them or the airline that said it was cancelled. It’s rubbish. There’s nothing we can do.
“We don’t know what we’re going to do tonight in terms of accommodation.
“We have put our cars in special car compounds for the next six days.”
Baptiste, who did not want to give his full name, said he was told his flight had been cancelled while on the tarmac.
He is travelling home to France with his family and told PA: “We have no information. When we arrived, we were stopped on the tarmac and in the plane. We learned that our flight had been cancelled.
“We’re going to Geneva in Switzerland, so we’re trying to find a flight for tomorrow and a hotel.”
