Air traffic control provider comes under fire after second issue in two weeks

Nats said Monday’s issue had been fixed (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire Rosie Shead 2 minutes ago Passengers and airlines “deserve better” an aviation industry body has said, as air traffic controllers came under fire after a second issue within two weeks caused flight disruption.

Flights were delayed in Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England amid an air traffic control (ATC) issue on Monday, National Air Traffic Services (Nats) said.

The company said the issue was unrelated to a software fault at Nats on September 8, which caused more than 2,000 flights to be cancelled, disrupting hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Some 117 flights scheduled to depart the UK were cancelled on Monday, as well as 110 that were due to arrive, aviation analytics company Cirium said at around 4.30pm.

Passengers at Belfast International Airport, Co Antrim, following disruption to flights (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire On Monday, airlines expressed their dismay and anger at “yet another” ATC incident, and Ryanair repeated its calls for Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign.

EasyJet said the latest flight disruption “calls into question the resilience of Nats’ systems”, and Jet2 said customers and airlines need “action, accountability and proper resilience”.

According to Ryanair, more than 25,000 of its passengers were expected to be disrupted and more than 140 of its flights had been delayed on Monday.

Chief operations officer for Ryanair Neal McMahon said: “Martin Rolfe has presided over repeated system failures, repeated passenger disruption and repeated failures to deliver an effective back-up system.

Tim Alderslade, chief executive of industry body Airlines UK, said ATC was “critical national infrastructure” which “must be resilient enough to keep people moving”.

“Yet another Nats failure is causing delays and disruption for passengers and airlines alike, and comes just days after its report into the most recent major outage,” he said.

“Passengers and airlines deserve better and the independent CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) report, together with the forthcoming Civil Aviation Bill, must address the underlying weaknesses in the system so that these failures stop happening,” he added.

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EasyJet said: “This, once again, calls into question the resilience of Nats’ systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures.”