'Totally unacceptable, passengers deserve better': Transport secretary's response when asked if she has confidence in £1.5m air traffic control chief
A technical issue at National Air Traffic Services (NATS) caused more than 2,000 flights arriving or departing the UK to be cancelled
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has said that the flight disruption that affected tens of thousands of people earlier this week was "totally unacceptable".
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A technical issue at National Air Traffic Services (NATS) caused more than 2,000 flights arriving or departing the UK to be cancelled following the fault on Tuesday.
British Airways (BA) said the fault forced it to cancel almost 550 flights, which impacted more than 85,000 passengers.
Ms Alexander told Nick Ferrari at Breakfast that she is "confident" that NATS "prioritised safety" but she has made it clear to the chief executive that she expects a report outlining exactly what went wrong.
Read more: Air traffic control boss on £1.5m a year faces intense pressure to resign after latest flights chaos
"I do need to be clear with your listeners that the level of disruption that the travelling public had to endure was totally unacceptable, and air passengers do deserve better," she told LBC.
"I've also asked the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), who are the independent regulator of NATS, to conduct an independent review, because we can't have NATS marking their own homework here."
Downing Street said the Government still had confidence in NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe amid calls for his resignation.
Among those calling for the NATS boss’ resignation is Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary. who said Mr Rolfe’s position was “untenable.”
The air traffic services provider has apologised for disruption to passengers and airlines, for which Mr Rolfe said he took “full responsibility”.
They added: “We are very much aware of the additional pressure this has placed on colleagues across the industry, and thank them for their continued hard work.”
This isn't the first time issues with NATS have led to severe disruption for passengers.
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 suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.
When pressed by Nick on whether three strikes should mean Mr Rolfe is out, Ms Alexander said she is "not going to rush to judgement".
She said: "I do need to understand the details. But the fact that there was the incident in 2023 where a big investigation was done, and a number of recommendations were made about improving the resilience of the software and the IT systems at NATS.
"We need to go over the detail of that because earlier this year I was assured that all of those recommendations were implemented.
"The CAA produced reports in March and June of this year which I reviewed carefully, but something has gone wrong here clearly.
We need to get to the bottom of it and I think it's my responsibility as the Transport Secretary, acting on behalf of passengers who will be rightly angry and frustrated and the airlines to make sure that I hold NATS and also the Civil Aviation Authority to account."
Some 2,145 flights were affected over Tuesday and Wednesday, according to aviation analytics company Cirium.
Despite this, the CAA has said passengers are “unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident”.
A CAA spokesperson said: “We consider that disruption caused by the NATS outage is likely to be considered the result of ‘extraordinary circumstances’ under passenger rights rules.
“This means that although passengers should be looked after by airlines, they are unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident.”