European budget carriers Wizz Air and Ryanair on Tuesday called for an overhaul of Britain’s air traffic control provider NATS following a new technical issue that disrupted hundreds of flights at key airports in the country.
“A critical national infrastructure provider should not repeatedly bring the aviation system to a standstill. NATS is simply not fit for purpose in its current form,” a spokesperson for Wizz Air said in a statement.
Rival Ryanair also criticised the agency and called for the resignation of its CEO, Martin Rolfe.
“Following the 2023 collapse, we were told lessons would be learned. We were told ‘resilience would improve’. We were told the systems had been fixed. Yet here we are again,” Ryanair Chief Operations Officer Neal McMahon said.
NATS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2024, Britain’s aviation regulator said NATS needed to review its contingency plans for outages after the automatic processing of flight plans had malfunctioned a year earlier, causing chaos across Britain’s airports.
The UK’s civil aviation body on Tuesday said it had been in touch with NATS over the incident and expects the latter to share a full report on the incident.
“We will then consider whether any further steps need to be taken to help secure the safe reliability of the UK’s air traffic control system,” a spokesperson for the Civil Aviation Authority said.
