'Why wasn't it found before?': Airline boss says industry has 'lost confidence' in UK air traffic control following latest outage
The latest outage on Monday saw hundreds of flights affected, two weeks after 2,000 were cancelled due to a software defect
The boss of budget airline Whizz Air has questioned why a defect in air traffic control wasn't spotted sooner, after hundreds of flights were cancelled for the second time in two weeks.
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Yvonne Moynihan, the managing director at Whizz Air UK, said the aviation industry has lost confidence in National Air Traffic Services [Nats] boss Martin Rolfe after the latest system failure.
On Monday, flights were delayed in Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England amid an air traffic control (ATC) issue.
Nats said the issue was unrelated to a software fault on September 8 that caused more than 2,000 flights to be cancelled, disrupting hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Read more: Air traffic control boss on £1.5m a year faces intense pressure to resign after latest flights chaos
But despite that, calls have grown on the company to clarify how long they were aware of the defects that affected some 10,000 passengers.
Ms Moynihan told LBC: "We have a preliminary report from the incident on the 8th of September, two weeks ago, but you know, there's a full report still due.
"That needs to happen quicker, and certainly we need to see and feel more confidence in the system because right now the airline industry has come out to say that it doesn't have confidence in the national infrastructure that provides airspace transport.
"So what the report says is that there was a legacy software defect.
"However, what the report doesn't say, which is, is more concerning, is how long this latent defect was in place.
"Why wasn't it found before? Was it preventable?
"The most concerning, I would say, is that this is a single piece of corrupted data that seems to have taken down the entire system, so how come this happened?
"Because in aviation, it's a very complex industry, but you do have contingency.
"You should have operational robustness built in, and there are still open questions about that operational robustness and any fallback systems."
Aviation analytics company Cirium said at around 4.30 pm that some 117 flights scheduled to depart the UK were cancelled on Monday, as well as 110 due to arrive.
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.
Repeated calls have been made for Mr Rolfe to stand down from his position, including by Ryanair's chief operations officer Neal McMahon.
Mr 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."
But Ms Moynihan insisted the issue was deeper than focussing on just one person.
She said: "I think it's a bit of a distraction to focus on one individual, I think that the debate is wider than that.
"We do believe at this stage that there are questions of leadership but also questions of governance as well.
"NATS has been aware of these issues since 2023, and we've had successive failures impacting tens of thousands of passengers.
"So it goes to a question of what assurances were given to the top leadership at NATS, to the Transport Secretary."
