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Ryanair CEO Accuses UK Air Traffic Control Chief of Misleading Public Over Outage
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has accused Martin Rolfe, chief executive of Britain’s air traffic control operator NATS, of lying about the cause of a re...
By Wavers News
O’Leary said Ryanair had been told that the outage was caused by a rogue flight plan, similar to the incident that caused major disruption in 2023. Rolfe, however, said in a BBC interview that he believed the latest failure had a different cause.
The disagreement comes after the latest NATS failure affected thousands of flights across UK airports. The government has given Rolfe one week to investigate and report on what caused the latest systems failure, while the Civil Aviation Authority is conducting a separate independent review.
O’Leary has repeatedly criticised NATS and called for Rolfe to step down. Ryanair is also pursuing legal action against NATS in London's High Court over losses from the 2023 outage, seeking more than £7 million.
NATS has maintained that the latest failure was caused by a different issue from the 2023 incident, but it has not publicly provided further details about the exact cause while investigations continue.
The 2023 failure was linked by a NATS investigation to an unusual flight-plan problem involving two separate waypoints with identical names, which caused both the main system and its backup to enter a fail-safe mode.
The latest dispute adds to pressure on Britain's air traffic control system after the recent outage caused widespread cancellations and delays, leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers affected.