Fresh NATS failure sparks flight chaos and renewed calls for boss to quit

PASSENGERS were left facing fresh disruption on Monday after a second air traffic control failure in just two weeks hit UK airports, reigniting anger over repeated breakdowns at NATS and fresh demands for its chief executive to resign.

Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast airports suffered delays, which NATS blamed on an issue at its Prestwick centre in Scotland, while London Gatwick and London City warned of further disruption.

The failure comes barely a fortnight after a separate software fault forced the cancellation of around 2,000 flights and upended the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of people.

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Ryanair, Europe's biggest airline, said 25,000 of its passengers had been hit by Monday's failure alone and renewed its call for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign, as transport secretary Heidi Alexander weighs his future following the repeated breakdowns.

EasyJet cancelled flights and British Airways warned customers of likely disruption.

NATS insisted Monday's problem was a connectivity issue "unrelated" to the earlier software defect, with cancellations reaching 24 by 0858 GMT.

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But for airlines and passengers, the distinction will offer little comfort — this is now the second serious breakdown in as many weeks, on top of a 2023 outage that cost the industry £100 million and caused nationwide travel chaos.

EasyJet said the latest failure "once again" exposed the fragility of NATS' systems.

"This... calls into question the resilience of NATS' systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures," the airline said, adding to mounting pressure on the organisation to explain how a second major disruption could happen so soon after the last.

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Transport secretary Alexander said the fault had since been fixed and systems were resuming.

"I know this will be deeply frustrating for passengers after the previous issue," she said — a statement likely to do little to quell growing frustration at an organisation now facing serious questions over its ability to keep Britain's skies running reliably.

(With inputs from Reuters)