Airlines press NATS as government-commissioned review proceeds
A second air traffic control failure this month, on Monday at NATS’s Prestwick centre, disrupted flights across northern UK airports. According to the aviation analytics firm Cirium, the failure led to more than 200 cancellations and many additional delays affecting tens of thousands of travellers. The Prestwick centre manages airspace over Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland.
The disruption came roughly two weeks after an undetected software flaw at NATS’s main Swanwick control centre in early September caused more than 2,000 flight cancellations over two days and left hundreds of thousands of passengers affected. Some travellers slept on airport floors; others were stranded abroad.
NATS said the two incidents were unrelated. The Prestwick failure was attributed to an unspecified “connectivity issue” specific to the system used in Scotland. The earlier Swanwick failure stemmed from a previously undetected software flaw whose impact, NATS said, depended on “a very specific set of circumstances combining in a millisecond.”
The pattern has become familiar. On the August 2023 bank holiday weekend, a problem with a single aircraft’s flight plan caused a key Swanwick system to break down, affecting 700,000 passengers. Roughly two years later, a “radar-related issue” at the same centre disrupted air traffic for four hours and led to the cancellation of 150 flights.
NATS oversees some of the busiest airspace in Europe, including the approaches to Heathrow and Gatwick, handling up to 8,000 flights a day. Inside the Swanwick centre, hundreds of staff sit behind arrays of radar screens managing what Steve Heapy, chief executive of Jet2, characterised as critical national infrastructure that passengers and airlines depend on without fail.
Heapy said: “It is simply not good enough for this critical national infrastructure to keep letting customers down.”
EasyJet said the latest incident “calls into question the resilience of Nats’ systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures.”
A NATS spokesperson, apologising for Monday’s disruption, said technology “can and sometimes does fail. Our job is minimising disruption where possible.” The spokesperson continued: “What isn’t acceptable is any incident where safety is compromised — this is always our first priority.”
Sources told the BBC that airlines are privately “furious” that disruption keeps recurring and that they bear the costs of refunding passengers and caring for those stranded by delays. The sources said there are deep concerns that not enough resources are being committed to ensuring the air traffic control system’s resilience.
Ryanair has repeatedly called for NATS Chief Executive Martin Rolfe to resign, or, failing that, for Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander to remove him.
Alexander has described the early September disruption as “completely unacceptable,” but the government has shown little appetite to force a leadership change at NATS. The government has asked the Civil Aviation Authority to conduct an independent review of the September Swanwick incident, which is expected to take six months to complete. Monday’s failure does not appear to have changed that timetable, with action unlikely before the CAA’s report is published.
Rolfe, who said on Friday he has no plans to resign, emphasised that in systems of such complexity, obscure faults are extremely hard to prevent. “We spent so much time making sure they work that anything that does happen of this nature is, by its very nature, going to be incredibly complicated and probably difficult to understand at the time,” he said.
It is clear that impatience with NATS failures is growing, both among the airlines that pay for air traffic services and among the passengers who bear the brunt when systems do not work as they should.