Ryanair demands aviation boss sacking over 'outrageous' Nats disruption that cancelled Scottish flights

Ryanair said it was “outrageous” that lessons had not been learned by National Air Traffic Services (Nats) from an even more significant technical problem two years ago.

A UK government minister suggested improvement measures taken in the incident’s aftermath had been insufficient.

Four flights were cancelled at Edinburgh Airport and a fifth, from France, diverted elsewhere. One KLM flight from Glasgow to Amsterdam was also grounded, but it has yet to be confirmed whether this was related to the disruption. Aberdeen Airport said it had suffered no cancellations.

The three airports said flights had returned to normal by Thursday morning, although British Airways said a handful of its services elsewhere had been cancelled because aircraft and crew were out of position. More than 150 flights were cancelled overall across the UK.

Nats said the incident, which lasted for 20 minutes shortly after 4pm on Wednesday, was a “radar-related issue”, during which it restricted the number of aircraft flying in its London control area, which covers the southern half of the UK.

All departures from Edinburgh were held for a time, but Nats said it had switched to a secondary system to restore normal operations. Most of the cancellations were at Heathrow.

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The disruption follows 1,600 cancellations, including more than 200 in Scotland, which affected 700,000 passengers in August 2023 after another Nats technical fault.

An independent review of the incident recommended that Nats “review its contingency and engineering resource management arrangements”.

Ryanair called for Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe to be removed by ministers if he did not step down.

Chief operating officer Neal McMahon said: "It is outrageous that passengers are once again being hit with delays and disruption due to Martin Rolfe's continued mismanagement of Nats.

"It is clear that no lessons have been learnt since the August 2023 Nats system outage, and passengers continue to suffer as a result of Martin Rolfe's incompetence.

"If Mr Rolfe fails to resign on the back of this latest Nats system outage that has disrupted thousands of passengers yet again, then UK transport secretary Heidi Alexander must act without delay to remove Martin Rolfe and deliver urgent reform of Nats' shambolic air traffic control service, so that airlines and passengers are no longer forced to endure these preventable delays caused by persistent Nats failures."

UK business minister Gareth Thomas told Times Radio that Mr Rolfe was being “summoned” to see Ms Alexander on Thursday.

He said: "Clearly, an incident happened two years ago and measures were taken then. It looks like those measures weren't enough, but we need to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, and conversations will take place today."

A Nats spokesperson said: “This was a radar-related issue which was resolved by quickly switching to the back-up system during which time we reduced traffic to ensure safety. There is no evidence that this was cyber related.”

Nats said it had “submitted evidence of closure to the Civil Aviation Authority [regulator] on all 11 of the recommendations assigned to us” in the report into the 2023 incident.