Britain’s embattled air traffic control chief has been ordered to deliver a report by next Wednesday into the technical failure that led to the cancellation of around 2,000 flights, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said.
National Air Traffic Services (NATS) chief executive Martin Rolfe was called in for talks with Ms Alexander on Wednesday, amid mounting pressure for him to resign.
Mr Rolfe was given one week to explain the fault, which struck the previous day. The Transport Secretary confirmed that the findings must “be on my desk next Wednesday”.
The IT failure disrupted 2,145 flights across Tuesday and Wednesday and affected an estimated 330,000 passengers, with Mr Rolfe facing blame for the widespread travel chaos.
He has received £2.2million in bonuses and incentive payments during the past three years, despite two major air traffic control failures in 2023 and 2025.
Ms Alexander said she met Mr Rolfe “within 24 hours of the incident” to demand a report within a week. She has also asked Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) chief executive Rob Bishton to complete an independent review within six months.
Speaking to Times Radio, she said: “I’m particularly interested in the cause of this incident, the way in which backup systems operated. There was an incident back in 2023 and there was a big review done subsequent to that.
“The report was published on that earlier this year. There were 34 recommendations from that review, which have all been implemented. We need to interrogate what has gone wrong here. We need to be looking at the planned IT upgrades.”
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander met National Air Traffic Services (NATS) chief executive Martin Rolfe on Wednesday.
NATS boss Martin Rolfe has faced calls to step down after the technical failure that cancelled around 2,000 flights.
Asked whether NATS is being ‘run by the right person,’ she added: ‘I’ve asked the chief executive to produce a report that needs to be on my desk next Wednesday.
‘I will be looking very carefully at that. I’ve also asked the Civil Aviation Authority to do an independent piece of work. It wouldn’t be right for NATS to be marking their own homework. And that’s why we’ve asked the CAA to do that independent investigation.
‘I’m going to be looking very carefully at that. I’m not going to be rushing to judgments until I see the work that arrives on my desk next week, and also the slightly longer piece of work that the Civil Aviation Authority will be doing.’
Last July, a ‘radar-related issue’ caused an air traffic control failure which disrupted thousands of passengers and forced the cancellation of more than 160 flights.
In August 2023, more than 700,000 passengers suffered disruption when flights were grounded at UK airports when NATS suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.
Ms Alexander told MPs on Wednesday that she did not believe the issue was ‘unavoidable’, while Downing Street said the Government still had confidence in Mr Rolfe.
But among those calling for Mr Rolfe’s resignation was Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary, who said the NATS chief’s position was ‘untenable’.
Mr O’Leary accused the Government of trying to ‘protect’ Mr Rolfe, adding that it was ‘beyond comprehension’ that he was being asked to investigate himself.
The Ryanair boss also accused Mr Rolfe of lying about the cause of the outage. He said the airline had been told by NATS that the outage was caused by a rogue flight plan, the same problem that caused a major disruption in 2023.
Mr Rolfe said he believed the latest outage had been caused by ‘something different’ from previous incidents but Mr O’Leary rejected his explanation.
Passengers contend with flight delays at Heathrow Terminal 2… the chaos impacted 330,000 passengers, with 2,145 flights affected across Tuesday and Wednesday
Passengers queued for hours at the South Terminal of London Gatwick Airport on Wednesday
‘NATS have told us it was another rogue flight plan. Now Martin Rolfe is out denying it yesterday,’ Mr O’Leary said. ‘I believe he’s telling lies to save his own skin.’
A NATS investigation into the 2023 outage found it was caused by a ‘one-in-15million’ event in which a flight plan contained two identically named but separate waypoints, forcing both the system and its back-up into a ‘fail-safe’ mode.
Ryanair is suing NATS in London’s High Court for more than £7million over the 2023 outage and has called on the operator to reinvest profits in performance improvements and staffing.
easyJet holidays chief executive Garry Wilson has called the week’s events ‘an absolute pain’ but did not back calls for Mr Rolfe to resign.
Speaking at the Travel Weekly Future of Travel Conference yesterday, he said there was a ‘much more fundamental question to answer about infrastructure investment’.
Tui UK & Ireland managing director Neil Swanson also failed to call for Mr Rolfe’s departure. But he did say of NATS: ‘They have got to do something about this. It is not about individuals; this is about proper investment. They have got to take some action.’
Sources within Whitehall yesterday questioned how long Mr Rolfe can keep his job given the ‘litany of failure’.
One told The Times: ‘The Government holds the golden share in NATS and Martin Rolfe has overseen repeated outages that seem to wash off him like water off a duck’s back. In no other role could you oversee such a litany of failure and survive.’
Transport minister Keir Mather said disruption to those travelling ‘raises really serious questions about contingency planning and resilience planning at our airports’.
NATS has apologised for disruption to passengers and airlines, for which Mr Rolfe said he took ‘full responsibility’.
NATS also said yesterday that the investigation into Tuesday’s incident was ‘already under way’ and it would report to the Transport Secretary and CAA next week.
The air traffic controller added: ‘We are very much aware of the additional pressure this has placed on colleagues across the industry, and thank them for their continued hard work.’
The CAA has said passengers are ‘unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations that were directly caused by the incident’, because the outage is likely to be considered the result of ‘extraordinary circumstances’.
The flight disruption has now eased as airports including London Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stansted confirmed their operations had returned to normal.
Data firm Cirium said 54 of 3,028 scheduled arrivals were cancelled or were not operating yesterday. Some 47 of 3,033 scheduled departures were also affected.