Passengers and airlines “deserve better” an aviation industry body has said, as air traffic controllers came under fire after a second issue within two weeks caused flight disruption.
Flights were delayed in Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England amid an air traffic control (ATC) issue on Monday, National Air Traffic Services (Nats) said.
The company said the issue was unrelated to a software fault at Nats on September 8, which caused more than 2,000 flights to be cancelled, disrupting hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Some 117 flights scheduled to depart the UK were cancelled on Monday, as well as 110 that were due to arrive, aviation analytics company Cirium said at around 4.30pm.
On Monday, airlines expressed their dismay and anger at “yet another” ATC incident, and Ryanair repeated its calls for Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign.
EasyJet said the latest flight disruption “calls into question the resilience of Nats’ systems”, and Jet2 said customers and airlines need “action, accountability and proper resilience”.
According to Ryanair, more than 25,000 of its passengers were expected to be disrupted and more than 140 of its flights had been delayed on Monday.
Chief operations officer for Ryanair Neal McMahon 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.”
Tim Alderslade, chief executive of industry body Airlines UK, said ATC was “critical national infrastructure” which “must be resilient enough to keep people moving”.
“Yet another Nats failure is causing delays and disruption for passengers and airlines alike, and comes just days after its report into the most recent major outage,” he said.
“Passengers and airlines deserve better and the independent CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) report, together with the forthcoming Civil Aviation Bill, must address the underlying weaknesses in the system so that these failures stop happening,” he added.
EasyJet said: “This, once again, calls into question the resilience of Nats’ systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures.”
Jet2 chief executive Steve Heapy said it was “simply not good enough for this critical national infrastructure to keep letting customers down.”
“There have been too many incidents, too many reports and too many promises of lessons being learned,” he said.
“What customers and airlines need now is action, accountability and proper resilience, and we need it urgently.”
He added: “Make no mistake, we are counting the cost of this disruption and will be sending another bill to Nats.”
The managing director of Wizz Air UK said Nats’ insistence that the two September issues were unrelated does not offer reassurance.
Yvonne Moynihan said: “Last week, a Nats system failure brought widespread disruption to the south of the UK.
“Today, another failure has affected the north.
“Passengers and airlines are entitled to ask: which part of the country will be next?
“Nats claims the two incidents are unrelated.
“Far from offering reassurance, this raises an even more serious question: how many other hidden weaknesses remain within its systems?”
British Airways said it was “disappointing” that some customers may experience disruption after “yet another technical fault with Nats”.
Bride-to-be Barbara Ann Stoddart said she was “completely stressed out” after her journey to her Las Vegas wedding was disrupted.
Travelling with groom Andrew Lithgow, their three children, best man and a friend, the group’s flight from Glasgow to Heathrow was cancelled on Monday, meaning they will miss their connection.
They have now been booked on to a flight for late afternoon on Tuesday.
She said: “I’m completely stressed out. This has been planned for about a year-and-a-half, going away to get married, and the flight has now been cancelled, so we’re going to miss a full day as we won’t be there till tomorrow night.
“I have still to go to the county court in Vegas to go and get the marriage licence, and I’ve got to be there three days in advance.
“The wedding is on Saturday but if there’s any hiccups I might not be getting married on Saturday now.”
The ATC provider said airports south of Manchester had been “broadly unaffected” on Monday, but that flights heading north and departing from Scottish airports had been experiencing some delays.
Airports in Edinburgh, Belfast and Manchester were registering delayed flights, and Luton Airport said domestic flights had been disrupted.
Nats said Monday’s incident was caused by a “connectivity issue” at its Prestwick centre in Scotland, which has since been fixed with its system now running at “full capacity.”
In a post on X, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander acknowledged how “deeply frustrating” the latest disruption would be “after the previous issue.”
During an unrelated visit to Edinburgh Airport, Scottish First Minister John Swinney said the incident was “very regrettable” and demonstrated the importance of “resilience” in ATC systems.
Passengers impacted by Monday’s fault are “unlikely to be entitled to compensation” as it was likely to be considered “the result of ‘extraordinary circumstances’ under passenger rights rules”, the Civil Aviation Authority said.
An initial report by Nats into the flight chaos on September 8 found it was caused by a software defect and not by “any incorrect actions”.
The fault happened in “the space of a millisecond”, the report said.
Mr Rolfe previously apologised for the incident earlier this month, for which he said he took “full responsibility”.
Last July a “radar-related issue” caused an air traffic control failure which disrupted thousands of passengers and forced the cancellation of more than 160 flights.
In August 2023, more than 700,000 passengers suffered disruption when flights were grounded at UK airports when Nats experienced a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.
Nats is the UK’s leading provider of air traffic control services and handles about 2.5 million flights per year.
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