London, Sept. 9 – European budget carriers Wizz Air and Ryanair called for an overhaul of Britain’s air traffic control provider NATS following a technical issue that disrupted hundreds of passenger flights at key UK airports. The latest National Air Traffic Services incident renewed scrutiny of aviation system reliability after previous outages affected flight operations nationwide and across Europe.
A Wizz Air spokesperson said a critical national infrastructure provider should not repeatedly bring the aviation system to a standstill and that NATS is simply not fit for purpose in its current form. Ryanair criticised the agency and called for the resignation of CEO Martin Rolfe, as Chief Operations Officer Neal McMahon noted that following the 2023 collapse, promised lessons and resilience improvements had failed.
Britain’s aviation regulator said in 2024 that NATS needed to review contingency plans for outages after automatic processing of flight plans malfunctioned a year earlier, causing chaos across British airports. NATS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday’s disruption.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority confirmed it had been in touch with NATS and expects a full incident report before considering any further regulatory steps to help secure the safe reliability of the UK air traffic