Ryanair calls for air traffic control chief to resign after latest failure
A British Airways insider said that though the cause of the radar outage was not yet known, 'Nats are responsible for the radar, so you have to say that the buck stops with them'.
The crisis renews pressure on Mr Rolfe, who has run Nats since 2015 and was paid £1.4m a year at the time of the 2023 fiasco.
Michael O'Leary, Ryanair's chief executive, has called for Mr Rolfe to quit on several occasions. Mr O'Leary blamed the sluggish response to the 2023 incident over the August bank holiday on Mr Rolfe having allowed engineers crucial to the functioning of Nats to work from home on the busiest weekend of the year.
He said that meant they were 'sat watching Football Focus in their jim-jams' at the time of the outage.
The Ryanair boss went on to compare Nats – which runs the airspace over Britain and the whole of the eastern Atlantic – to Dad's Army, and said that it was 'short-staffed every summer'.
Mr O'Leary has accused Mr Rolfe of being 'overpaid' and called him a 'clown'.
'Major failure'
BA last year wrote to staff blaming Nats, which controls flights at the country's busiest airports, for the failure of jets to get away from Heathrow following weather related delays in September.
Mr Rolfe has also been criticised for presiding over a recruitment policy that he admitted meant Nats 'spent a lot of time working on our diversity and inclusion agenda,' despite a chronic shortfall in headcount.
An independent report into the 2023 meltdown commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority and published last November said it represented a 'major failure' on the part of Nats.
It made 34 recommendations, instructing Mr Rolfe to review back-up plans and his allocation of engineering resources, as well as provide earlier notification of any future disruption.
UK-bound services operated by carriers including Ryanair, British Airways (BA) and EasyJet were unable to depart, while those already in the air were diverted to Paris and Brussels.
The majority of outbound services were also grounded, with only those operating at a lower altitude on domestic trips and short flights to the Continent able to operate.
Ryanair said that Nats, formerly known as National Air Traffic Services, must foot the bill for the disruption and compensate carriers and their customers accordingly.
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