Martin Rolfe, Air Traffic Control Boss, Says September Faults Are Fixed
Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe said the technical failures that disrupted UK flights in September have been fixed, while warning he cannot guarantee another outage will never happen. Airlines called for his resignation after the failures affected hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Martin Rolfe, chief executive of Nats, said at an aviation conference in London on Wednesday that the two technical faults that disrupted UK air traffic in September had been fixed. The air traffic control boss said he could not promise the system would never fail again.
The outages affected hundreds of thousands of passengers and prompted airlines, led by Ryanair, to call for Rolfe to resign. The first failure, on September 8, disrupted flights as Nats expected to handle about 8,000 flights that day; 6,000 flew, Rolfe said.
Airlines said the September 8 outage cost them tens of millions of pounds. A government-commissioned inquiry is examining that disruption.
Two failures in September
A second glitch struck Nats’s control center at Prestwick, Scotland, on September 21 and led to more than 200 flight cancellations. The failures occurred within a fortnight at the two control centers run by Nats, or National Air Traffic Control Services.
Rolfe described the causes as unprecedented and said the specific faults “will never recur.” He also cautioned that no complex technical system can be guaranteed never to experience another fault.
“Nobody standing on a stage like this can credibly promise that a complex technical system will never experience another fault,” Rolfe said.
He said he understood the disruption for people planning holidays and travel, and accepted the personal responsibility that came with his role. “If I am the cause of that disruption, I would expect to come in for a lot of flak,” he said.
Ryanair calls for accountability
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary repeatedly called for Rolfe to quit. Rolfe said he had not considered resigning and described O’Leary’s demands as familiar.
“To be fair, that is something he says all the time to pretty much everyone, so I’m not going to spend too much time worrying about that,” Rolfe said. “In fact, I quite enjoy not doing that.”
Neal McMahon, Ryanair’s chief operating officer, criticized Rolfe’s comments about Nats’s usual reliability. He compared the remarks to a captain describing a ship’s usual record after a disaster and said passengers were still left with “two shitshows in September.”
Nats’s early report said staff did not initially believe the September software problem was serious. The Civil Aviation Authority is reviewing the findings and is expected to report to Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander early in 2027.
Alexander said she expected the system to be resilient and called its failure “simply unacceptable.” She said she would wait for the regulator’s findings before acting, adding: “I can assure you that I will do whatever it takes to ensure that lessons are learned.”
