AS CAA REPORT CONFIRMS NATS “FAILED” TO ROSTER AND TRAIN STAFF

Ryanair, the UK’s no.1 airline, today (14 Nov) called on new Transport Minister, Louise Haigh, to take urgent action to reform the UK’s hopeless ATC service, after the CAA today published its final report on NATS’ ATC system collapse on 28Aug 2024, which confirms:

1. Inadequate contingency measures: NATS claimed “there is operational contingency available to allow safe service to continue through the ability to input flight data manually”, yet the CAA now confirms there were 7 manually operated terminals available for data entry on the day of the ATC system collapse but NATS staff were “not trained to enter flight plans”.
   
2. NATS staff not rostered: NATS engineers not available on site due to “the bank holiday” and they took more than 1½ hours to arrive on-site.
   
3. NATS failed to take action: NATS took 4 hours to escalate the system failure to manufacturers, who were able to fix the issue in 30 mins. Why were NATS so slow to react?
   
4. NATS failed to notify stakeholders: despite the systems failing at 08:32, NATS did not notify Eurocontrol until 10:43 (over 2hrs later) leaving its customer airlines, passengers, and airports to find out about the NATS collapse from Sky News and BBC TV.  

While Ryanair welcomes the CAA’s findings and comments that NATS system collapse “caused considerable distress to over 700,000 aviation passengers and resulted in substantial costs to airlines and airports”, Ryanair rejects NATS’ claim that it has “acted to address a number of findings arising from its own internal investigation after the incident”. After NATS’ system collapse in Aug 2023, NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe falsely claimed it was a “1-in-15 million tech glitch”, yet 3 months later (on 9^th Dec) the Gatwick ATC system collapsed again, delaying hundreds of flights and thousands of passengers travelling to/from Gatwick. This was followed by repeated NATS staff shortages in Summer 2024 causing more avoidable disruptions to airlines and passengers throughout the UK.

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said:

“UK Transport Minister, Louise Haigh, must now take immediate action to fix NATS hopeless service, and reform UK ATC so that airlines and passengers can avoid further delays/disruptions at the hands of NATS. She should start by sacking NATS overpaid (£1.5m p.a.) and underperforming CEO, Martin Rolfe, and get someone competent to reform and run the UK’s ATC services.”