Air traffic boss on £1.5m-a-year dodges ‘resign’ questions amid UK flights meltdown inquest‘I would say the UK has one of the best reputations in the world for its air traffic control service’ – Martin Rolfe
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Michael Howie, Senior News Editor1 minute ago
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The boss of Britain’s main air traffic provider dodged questions on whether he should resign as airlines demanded he quit after a system collapse sparked travel chaos.
Martin Rolfe, chief executive of National Air Traffic Service (NATS), was facing a grilling from the Transport Secretary on Wednesday as widespread disruption continues with hundreds of flights cancelled.
Tens of thousands of passengers were caught up in the chaos, which is continuing on Wednesday with further cancellations and delays as airlines deal with the knock-on impacts at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted.
According to FlightRadar, 246 flights had been cancelled at Heathrow Airport by 6am on Wednesday, while Gatwick passengers faced 33 cancellations.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander was speaking with Mr Rolfe on Wednesday morning before she addresses MPs in the Commons for the second reading of the Civil Aviation Bill.
Speaking to the BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Mr Rolfe – who last year was awarded £1.5million in pay – apologised for the issue but dodged questions over whether he would resign.
He said: “Inevitably, things do go wrong in complex systems.
Delayed passengers wait with their luggage at Terminal 3 of Heathrow Airport on Tuesday, September 8AFP/Getty
“We never want them to. We always hope they won’t, but we absolutely plan for them to and make sure we handle them properly.”
Mr Rolfe added: “I would say the UK has one of the best reputations in the world for its air traffic control service, both from a safety perspective and from a resilience perspective.
“Nats was actually a partial privatisation 25 years ago, and since that point, it’s had access to funding.
“We’ve invested way more than a billion in technology over that time, our service has consistently improved. Our safety is consistently improved from a very good base.
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“But all of those things don’t detract from the fact that when these things happen, it is disappointing and upsetting, for which I apologise.”
On the cause of the problem, Mr Rolfe said a “thorough” investigation would take place, but ruled out a cyber attack.
He added: “My focus and that of the team has been on both getting our system operating back up normally, which it is now, but there’s obviously a huge tail to the disruption and we’ll be working on that through the course of today.
“And then our attention will turn to exactly what’s happened in this particular incident.
Delayed passengers wait with their luggage at HeathrowAFP/Getty
“What I will say is, I don’t believe we’ve ever seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation.”
Ryanair said more than 65,000 of its passengers had been disrupted and it had cancelled more than 50 scheduled flights.
British Airways (BA) said it was forced to cancel or divert more than 100 flights on Tuesday which had impacted “tens of thousands of customers”.
Mr Rolfe has been under fire from Wizz Air and Ryanair after the latest issue which saw some passengers trapped on planes on runways for hours.
Neal McMahon, Ryanair’s chief operating officer, called on Mr Rolfe to resign, saying: “How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure Nats CEO Martin Rolfe accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns?
“Over three years after Nats’ catastrophic 2023 system meltdown, it’s clear that nothing has changed, with UK passengers once again suffering avoidable ATC (air traffic control) delays of up to eight hours today due a critical Nats ATC system failing.”
Discussing the response to Tuesday’s incident, Mr Rolfe said: “We had everybody on site, everybody was in the right place. We had all the engineers in place. We had our various partners from software industries and so on all on hand.
“So this was resolved as quickly as it could be, but within the limits of making sure that it all stayed safe.”
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