Flights from British airports resumed on Wednesday after a two‑day air‑traffic failure that cancelled more than 1,000 flights and left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded. The outage, which began on Tuesday, has intensified scrutiny of the national air‑traffic control provider NATS and its chief, Martin Rolfe.
Transport Minister Heidi Alexander will later on Wednesday hear from Rolfe after she summoned him to explain what happened, amid concerns that the infrastructure and technology are not up to scratch. The shutdown comes three years after the last system collapse in August 2023, when cancelled flights on one of the busiest travel days of the year cost airlines £100 million ($135 million).
Alexander said on X that she is seeking assurances that lessons will be learned and systems that support aviation are up to the job. Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, has been calling for Rolfe to resign since 2023, while Wizz Air’s UK managing director also said he should consider his position. Ryanair’s chief operating officer Neal McMahon told the BBC that Britain’s airspace underperformed other countries, adding that the country had seen “minor issues in other places, but nothing at the scale that we see, and consistently see, in the UK.”
Rolfe, who apologised to those affected by the issue, denied that Britain was worse than other countries and said the country’s air‑traffic service was well regarded from a safety and resilience perspective. “We have, at this point, ruled out cyber (attacks),” Rolfe told the BBC when asked about the cause, adding he believed it would be different to previous outages.
As operations restarted, Heathrow said passengers should check with their airline before heading to the airport as schedules would have changed due to the problems on Tuesday. The airport said it was expecting knock‑on impacts as aircraft and crew repositioned, and that it was working closely with its local NATS team and airline partners to recover normal operations as quickly as possible. London Gatwick, Britain’s second‑busiest airport, and the city’s Luton and Stansted also said they were operating but told passengers to check with their airline first.
Ryanair said around 150,000 of its passengers had been affected on Tuesday and it cancelled more than 200 flights, while British Airways said it had cancelled or diverted 100 flights with tens of thousands impacted. NATS is a public‑private partnership that is partially owned by airlines including British Airways and easyJet, pension funds and the government. Ryanair’s McMahon criticised the £175 million of dividends NATS paid to its owners last year, saying the company should reinvest its profits into technology and boost its staff numbers.
With the outage still fresh in the minds of passengers and airlines, the next step will be a formal briefing with Minister Alexander and an independent review of NATS’s systems. The outcome could shape the future of Britain’s aviation infrastructure and its standing on the global stage.
