LONDON: Airlines intensified their criticism of Britain’s aviation systems on Wednesday (Sep 9) after a major air traffic failure left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded, while ministers called in the flight control boss to explain the shutdown.
Flights resumed at major airports across the country after the hours-long outage on Tuesday, which resulted in the cancellation of 2,000 flights and ramped up pressure on air traffic control provider NATS and its boss Martin Rolfe.
Ryanair said NATS had told it that the cause of the shutdown was the same problem behind the last major air traffic outage in 2023 which cost airlines 100 million pounds (US$135 million). The carrier has repeatedly called for Rolfe to step down.
Transport minister Heidi Alexander will later on Wednesday hear directly from Rolfe after she summoned him to explain the fault, amid concerns over the resilience of the infrastructure and technology.
The NATS shutdown in August 2023 caused travel chaos, and there was also a radar-related technical issue in July 2025, which affected major airports including Britain’s largest, Heathrow.
“I am seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job,” Alexander said on X.
“ABSOLUTE RERUN” OF 2023 MELTDOWN
Michael O’Leary, group CEO of Ryanair which is Europe’s biggest airline, told Reuters the outage was “an absolute rerun” of what happened in 2023, when a rogue flight plan caused the shutdown.
“Fire him. He’s been there since 2015. He is useless,” he said of Rolfe.
NATS, however, said it was not the same issue as 2023.
“This issue affected our flight data system at Swanwick,” a NATS spokeswoman said.
“We will conduct a full investigation to establish the root cause and identify any further action required.”
Rolfe had also stated it was a new problem when he was interviewed on BBC Radio. He apologised for what had gone wrong without giving details of what had happened, apart from saying a cyberattack had been ruled out.
Aviation analytics company Cirium confirmed about 2,000 flights to and from UK airports had been affected by the outage on Tuesday and Wednesday combined, with 30 per cent of scheduled departures grounded on Tuesday and 5 per cent on Wednesday.
Ryanair, which said Britain’s air traffic services routinely underperformed those in other European countries, said its losses from Tuesday’s outage were 3 million pounds so far, after it cancelled 260 flights affecting 48,000 passengers.
British Airways on Tuesday cancelled or diverted 100 flights with tens of thousands impacted, and said on Wednesday 190 flights had been cancelled as disruption continued.
As operations restarted, Britain’s main airports – including London’s major Heathrow and Gatwick hubs – said passengers should check with their airline before heading to the airport as schedules would have changed.
“We are expecting knock-on impacts as aircraft and crew reposition,” the UK’s busiest hub said in a statement.
NATS, a public-private partnership which is partially owned by airlines including British Airways and easyJet, pension funds and the government, paid its owners dividends of 175 million pounds in 2025.
Ryanair is suing NATS at London’s High Court and seeking over 7 million pounds over the 2023 outage and has called on NATS to reinvest its profits into performance improvements and hiring more staff.
