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.”

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.

‘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.

For Matt Campbell, the September 11 attacks were not only the terrorist atrocity that killed his brother. He believes they also involved what he describes as one of the largest cover-ups in modern history.

Campbell maintains that the true cause of the World Trade Center’s destruction in 2001 has been concealed in the 25 years since the tragedy.

Over the past two decades, the Brighton reflexologist has pursued those he believes are responsible for what he calls a far-reaching deception. His campaign, he says, is for his brother Geoff and for the almost 3,000 people killed on 9/11.

Later this week, Campbell is due to speak at ‘Turning the Tide: 9/11 25 years later’, a conference at New York’s Museo del Barrio. Around 40 speakers, including first responders who were at the scene on 9/11, will present their views and theories to attendees. Next month, he will also attend a London Supreme Court hearing concerning 9/11 justice, proceedings he fought to secure.

His central claim runs counter to the US government’s account of the attacks. Campbell believes incendiary devices, rather than hijacked planes flown by terrorists, brought down the Twin Towers and World Trade Center 7, which collapsed later that day.

While he does not say he knows who was responsible, Campbell suspects that the US government and intelligence agencies could have played a role.

Campbell rejects the suggestion that his views should be dismissed as a conspiracy theory, a phrase he says he resents. Describing the label as “lazy”, he told the Daily Mail it was “usually applied by people who haven’t looked into anything and don’t know the key bits of information out there.”

“At the end of the day,” he said, “no-one has been held accountable for the deaths in the building and towers, and that’s what we want.”

Campbell is far from the only person who believes there is something more to 9/11 than we know.

Almost as soon as the Twin Towers went down, wild speculation began about what happened and who was responsible.

The attack remains the largest single loss of civilian life in US history and was among the first to have its narrative shaped by the internet, where forums were awash with fringe ideas about who was to blame and fake stories which seemed real.

A cottage industry of books, films and documentaries sprang up rejecting the notion that Osama bin Laden and his terror group Al Qaeda was behind the attacks and claiming to reveal the ‘truth’ about who was to blame.

One prominent theory holds that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, was behind the attacks.

Some people believe that the Pentagon was struck by a missile and not by United Flight 93 as the passengers battled the terrorists on board.

But the most prevalent of them all was that the towers came down due to an explosion, not the planes.

Richard Gage is an architect and prominent voice for the unproven theory that the Twin Towers were felled by explosives.

In recent years, Gage has been interviewed and embraced by influential figures like Tucker Carlson, who once ridiculed him but recently changed his mind – a sign of how widespread alternative theories about 9/11 have become.

Gage, told the Daily Mail that 9/11 was likely an ‘inside job by professionals,’ and challenged those who wrote him off as a crank.

‘Are you willing to look at the evidence or do you want to call us names?’ he said.

‘We can’t have a conversation if you just want to call us names.

‘I’m interested in speaking to people who have the courage to look at the evidence and ask themselves: ‘What does this mean?”

That question still drives Campbell in his search for answers.

His brother Geoff who was British but living in New York, was just 31 when he was killed while attending a conference in the World Trade Center for Reuters, the news agency for which he worked.

The North Tower was struck between floors 93 and 99. Geoff’s conference was being held on the 106th floor, trapping him, along with an estimated 1355 others, above the impact zone.

Campbell, now 57, remembered his brother as ‘such a funny, nice guy.’

‘He was very intelligent, he was annoyingly good at anything he tried his hand at,’ he said.

‘He played badminton for England, he was an exceptional chess player.

‘He died too young in an appalling, horrific way.’

Campbell began to ask questions about the official version of 9/11 after reading news articles calling the war in Afghanistan a ‘farce.’

He then devoured books about the disaster – more than 160 titles – first on intelligence failures and then other subjects.

‘Like most things, the more I looked it almost seemed so far from what we were told in the first few days of 9/11,’ Campbell said.

‘As I started to look, I got frustrated that nobody was being held accountable.’

To many people, some of Campbell’s frustrations will seem well founded.

Despite 25 years passing since 9/11, the alleged mastermind of the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has yet to go on trial at a military court in Guantanamo Bay, the US base in Cuba, where he has been held for two decades.

Last month, a judge ruled that the alleged terrorist’s confessions cannot be used in the secretive trial in a military court because they were obtained under torture.

A judge ruled last year that a long-running lawsuit by 9/11 families against the government of Saudi Arabia for allegedly helping the plane hijackers can move ahead.

But Campbell expects that case to be settled meaning there could well be no proper court hearing or trial of any kind.

He also said it was, ‘disgusting’ that the final report of the 9/11 Commission, which was set up by the US government to investigate how the attack happened, barely discussed how the Twin Towers went down.

The inquest into Geoff’s death in 2013, along with 10 other British victims, lasted just 90 minutes. Campbell is pushing to have it reopened. A hearing is scheduled for October at the UK’s Supreme Court. The Attorney General has previously blocked any such renewed inquest; October’s hearing will center on whether the office has that power without court oversight.

On other points, Campbell strays a long way from the official narrative from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an arm of the Commerce Department which was tasked with explaining what happened.

NIST’s exhaustive investigation involved more than 200 professionals and 400 emergency responders and interviews with 1,056 survivors from the World Trade Center buildings.

The conclusion was that the impact of the planes caused the Twin Towers to collapse and debris from those buildings caused fires that destroyed WTC 7.

Reached this week, the NIST declined to make anyone available for comment and directed the Daily Mail to the published reports.

‘We will let those materials speak for themselves,’ a spokesman said.

Campbell’s view is that the NIST report is deeply flawed.

He said: ‘It really was Building 7 for me, it just seemed so improbable that was how NIST described it, how it was normal office fires when the building fell at freefall acceleration for 2.5 seconds.

‘I started looking into the Towers and they all have strange anomalies.

‘There was a lot of evidence supporting in terms of eyewitnesses and expert testimony relating to the use of explosives or incendiaries, something other than jet fuel.’

Gage has a similar theory fueled by the fact that the steel columns inside the towers were melted.

‘Steel is not melted by jet fuel,’ Gage said. ‘The only thing that can do this is incendiaries.’

The NIST report said this was inaccurate.

The report said that fires caused the steel beams of WTC 7 to expand and caused a ‘key structural column to fail.’

‘The failure of this structural column then initiated a fire-induced progressive collapse of the entire building,’ the report said.

The report added that WTC 7 did not collapse in a free fall, stating: ‘NIST concluded that blast events inside the building did not occur and found no evidence supporting the existence of a blast event.’

Nor was there any evidence of incendiary devices in the Twin Towers, the report said.

So, if it wasn’t Al Qaeda, then who could have carried out the attack, and why?

‘I don’t know who,’ Campbell said.

‘But I do know the US authorities have made it extremely hard to get all the evidence regarding 9/11 released unredacted to the public.

‘That told me they’re to some extent involved in the cover up. For whom I don’t know.

‘You have to look at those doing the protecting, why are they doing it and who are they protecting.’

People deal with grief differently, and some may think that Campbell – quite understandably – has gone down the wrong path after suffering an appalling tragedy.

But he doesn’t see it that way.

‘How can it be the wrong path if it’s for truth and justice?’ said Campbell.

‘Try telling that to the Bloody Sunday families,’ referring to the infamous massacre of 25 civilians by British soldiers in 1979 in Ireland that led to a damning public inquiry.

‘I don’t subscribe to the ‘bring closure’ stuff either,’ Campbell said.

‘There is evidence which has not been put before a court regarding my brother’s death. All I ask is that it is allowed to be.’

This week, Campbell will be in New York along with his mother and other brother, Rob, for the first time since 9/11.

The visit marks an emotional milestone in Campbell’s campaign for the truth, but he will never give up looking for what he sees as the truth.

‘This (9/11) will be debated forever,’ he said. ‘But I want a trial, I want evidence to be tested, that’s what you expect after a murder – let alone a mass murder.’

Republicans packed the midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, where Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump delivered the closing message: GOP wins in November are essential.

Vance entered to loud cheers, thanking convention viewers for their patriotism and pledging that the administration would not allow the country to move “backwards.”

“Two years ago, we have to remember our nation, ladies and gentlemen, was tired. We were tired of seeing our factories close. We were tired of our neighbors dying of drug overdoses. We were tired of not being able to afford anything. We were tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free rein over our great country, and we were tired of being called racists for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous,” Vance said.

Vance said the country had reached a breaking point by late 2024, arguing that Washington’s “radicals” could not extinguish voters’ resolve. He credited the November 5 election with returning Trump to office as the nation’s 47th president and contrasted Democratic policies with what he said the Trump administration has since repaired.

“When we came into office, when we came into office just 18 months ago, so many of our fellow Americans sensed that they’d been robbed of their chance to build a good life,” he said. Vance pointed to falling worker wages, a 20 percent rise in prices and the entry of thousands of illegal immigrants during the Biden administration.

“The Democrat legacy of the last few years was that they bankrupted our country and left us poor. They left our country weaker, wide open, and our communities less safe. Their record, my friends, stands for itself. And rather than admit error and change course, of course, they are doubling down on the crazy,” Vance said.

The vice president also turned his attention to several Democratic candidates running in the midterms.

“In Texas, you have Democrats, grown men, who seem to be pretty obsessed with trans children,” he said, referring to James Talarico.

“[In] Denver, Colorado, you have Democrats who say that 9/11 was inevitable, who offer justifications for terrorists who murdered 3,000 of our fellow citizens,” Vance continued. He later added, “These are candidates who, when they’re not calling to repeal the Second Amendment, they will attack you as a literal white supremacist if you dare to criticize Sharia law.”

“They asked, my friends, for a one-way ticket to Washington to legislate and regulate and wield power over your lives; instead, in my opinion, they need a one-way ticket to a mental hospital,” he said, drawing applause.

President Trump took the stage to close down the show, walking out to Lee Greenwood singing, “God Bless the USA.”

“Less than two years ago, the American people gave us a mandate to save America, and in 19 months, I’ve delivered on every single promise I made, and I think I delivered on far more,” Trump told the crowd, walking through his administration’s extraordinary achievements.

“We went from the highest prescription drug prices by far anywhere in the world, to the lowest prescription drug prices anywhere in the world, and that alone should get us a big victory in our midterms that are coming up. Get out and vote, please,” Trump said. “Get out and vote. The stock market has set 80 all-time record highs. Think of it in a short period of time – 80, 80 days we set records, and more Americans are working today than ever before.”

Trump also touted terminating all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates all across the federal government, as well as banning transgender ideology and critical race theory in our schools and putting a stop to the “transgender mutilation of our beautiful children.”

“And as you know, we had big court victories on this. We will not have men playing in women’s sports,” the president said to massive applause.

However, Trump continued, if Democrats and the “communists” win the election, it will be a very different world.

“They’re promising to confiscate your wealth, tax your Social Security, abolish no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. They’re going to defund the police, giving voting rights and welfare to 25 million illegal aliens, destroy Texas oil and gas, thereby doubling and tripling your taxes,” the commander-in-chief warned. “Have men playing in women’s sports, transgender for everybody, the mutilation of your children, and set loose criminals to rob, rape, and kill like we had just two years ago. ”

Trump teased a “Trump dividend” if Republicans win, previewing “$5,000 for every adult citizen in our country.”

“And we can do that because our country has never done better. We’re taking in trillions — trillions, trillions of dollars. There’s never been any country, not even close, that’s come anywhere near,” Trump said, adding, “It’s about time we take care of our adults.”

Trump also had an invigorated and laughing crowd pledge to bring their families out to vote on November 3 to endure Republican victories across the country.

“So please go and vote,” Trump said. “We will defeat the communists. We will reject – and that’s what they are. They’re not socialists. They’re not Democrats. They’re communists. We will reject these radical left lunatics. We will demolish the extremists, fanatics, lunatics — lunatics, and criminals who want to destroy our country.”

The pair closed out the convention on its final night after historic streaming numbers the night before – over 34 million impressions on TikTok alone. Additionally, the RNC garnered tens of millions of impressions on other social media platforms, including views on X and Facebook.

“President Trump is the ultimate turnout driver for the MAGA base, and today’s historic, sold-out crowd proved it,” White House spokeswoman Allison Schuster told – News.

She added, “While Radical Left Democrats fail the American people with tax hikes, soft-on-crime policies, and defunding of federal law enforcement, hardworking Americans have a champion in President Trump and his commonsense agenda of lower taxes, safer streets, and secure borders.”

Prior to the night’s close, President Trump took to Truth Social, noting that the convention’s day-one was a “major, sold-out hit, far bigger, better, and more important than anyone thought possible,” even beating the numbers for the opening night of the NFL’s regular season.