• Ryanair and Wizz Air have renewed calls for major changes at NATS after another technical failure disrupted hundreds of flights at major UK airports.
• Wizz Air questioned NATS’s ability to provide a resilient national service, arguing that repeated outages are no longer acceptable for critical aviation infrastructure.
• Ryanair called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign, saying the latest failure demonstrated that promised improvements following the 2023 disruption had not delivered sufficient resilience.

Britain’s air traffic control system is facing renewed scrutiny after another technical failure caused widespread disruption at some of the country’s busiest airports, prompting two of Europe’s largest low-cost airlines to demand fundamental changes at NATS.

Wizz Air argued that the latest incident highlighted a wider problem with the resilience of the UK’s aviation infrastructure. The airline said an organisation responsible for such critical national infrastructure should not be capable of repeatedly bringing large parts of the country’s air transport network to a halt.

Ryanair went further, calling for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to step down. The airline’s chief operations officer, Neal McMahon, said the latest disruption was particularly concerning because airlines had previously been assured that the failures behind the major 2023 incident had been addressed.

According to McMahon, the industry had been promised stronger resilience and repaired systems following the 2023 collapse. The recurrence of a significant technical problem has now raised questions over whether those measures have been effective enough.

NATS said it had identified and implemented a fix for the latest problem. It added that it was coordinating with airlines and airports as services returned to normal.

The incident comes against the backdrop of regulatory concerns dating back to the disruption in 2023, when a failure in the automatic processing of flight plans triggered severe delays and cancellations across the UK.

Following that episode, the Civil Aviation Authority said in 2024 that NATS needed to reassess its contingency arrangements for potential system outages. The regulator has now confirmed that it has been in contact with NATS over the latest failure and expects the air traffic control provider to submit a detailed report. The CAA said it would examine the findings before deciding whether additional action was necessary to safeguard the reliability and safety of the UK’s air traffic control network.

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