Ryanair calls for ‘urgent’ action to reform UK’s ‘hopeless’ air traffic control body

The boss of low-cost airline Ryanair has labelled the UK’s air traffic control body as “hopeless” and called for its chief to be sacked after a damning report revealed a litany of failures at the organisation.

Michael O’Leary hit out at the head of the body, known as NATS, claiming he was “overpaid and underperforming”.

His comments come after the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) published a report this morning examining the disastrous NATS air traffic control meltdown last year.

It estimated that a technical glitch ultimately impacted over 700,000 passengers, with 300,000 people affected by cancellations, 95,000 people forced to endure delays of over three hours, while a further 300,000 people faced delays of less than three hours.

The airline said the report proved there were “inadequate contingency measures” in place at the body, despite NATS claiming the contrary.

“UK Transport Minister, Louise Haigh, must now take immediate action to fix NATS hopeless service, and reform UK ATC (air traffic control) so that airlines and passengers can avoid further delays/disruptions at the hands of NATS,” O’Leary said today.

In its report, the CAA confirmed there were seven manually operated terminals available on the 28 August when the meltdown happened, but NATS staff were “not trained to enter flight plans”.

The report also said the body failed to take action in time following the glitch.

The report gives 34 recommendations for NATS (National Air Traffic Services), airlines, CAA and Government, to prevent widespread impact from technical failures in the future.

This must ‘never be allowed to happen again’

However, Ryanair questioned NATS’ claim that it has since “acted to address a number of findings arising from its own internal investigation after the incident”.

Johan Lundgren, the chief executive of Easyjet, said the report made clear that airlines and passengers were “severely let down by NATS due to its failure of resilience and lack of planning”.

“Airlines were then left picking up the pieces and costs which ran into millions,” he said, adding that a failure of this scale must “never be allowed to happen again.”

After the report was published this morning, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh said: “The NATS IT failure last year was an unprecedented event that we all hope never happens again, so I welcome the final report and its recommendations to strengthen the sector and restore passenger confidence.

“I’ve said before that I will be the passenger-in-chief and my priority is to ensure all passengers feel confident when they fly – that’s why my department will look to introduce reforms, when we can, to provide air travellers with the highest level of protection possible.”en we can, to provide air travellers with the highest level of protection possible.”