Parliament’s transport committee heard airlines claim they were not directly informed about the 28 August debacle, which saw UK air traffic control grind to a halt at 08.30 due to a systems bug that affected 2,000 flights and 300,000 passengers. Ryanair estimated the cost of the disruption at £15 million, and easyJet a similar figure.

The committee was told airlines scrambled to find accommodation for passengers on one of the year’s busiest travel days, with many left sleeping in airports.

"There was some very poor communication from Nats [National Air Traffic Services],” Tim Alderslade, Airlines UK chief executive, told the committee, adding he heard about the situation from Sky News.

Alderslade said the first formal communication came at 11am – three hours after the shutdown. This, he said, impacted member airlines’ ability to communicate the situation to customers and enact contingencies.

Ryanair group chief executive Michael O’Leary also said had received no notification, and questioned why a single rogue flight plan had led to the entire system and its backup shutting down, forcing Ryanair to cancel 350 flights.

O’Leary blasted Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe, branding him “vastly overpaid and incompetent”, and called for his removal. He added Nats had given £50 million to shareholders. “They should be reimbursing airlines instead,” he said.

‘Lessons to be learned’

Loganair chief executive Jonathan Hinkles told MPs he was informed about the shutdown at 11am by Eurocontrol, mainland Europe’s air traffic control provider. “Those two-and-a-half hours was time we could have been putting arrangements in place,” he said. “Communication from Nats was absolutely non-existent.”

Loganair incurred customer care costs of £300,000 in five hours, he said. Hinkles added the system bug should have been simple to fix, telling MPs: “I can see no reason, other than it was a bank holiday, why it took so long to happen.” He also said airlines should be given the right to recover costs from Nats.

Rolfe told the committee the issue was a software bug that could not reoccur. He said the problem was caused by “circumstances never seen before”, but claimed France and Italy had suffered similar malfunctions.

Rolfe said Eurocontrol was responsible for passing on disruption messages and had done so “instantly” to operational staff, but not management. He admitted there were “lessons to be learned”.

Govt-led ‘Delay Repay’?

The committee also quizzed Nats about Gatwick, where a chronic shortage of air traffic controllers saw Gatwick cap air movements last month, with this cap subsequently extended into October. Sophie Dekkers, easyJet chief commercial officer, said. “No other ATC provider in Europe is asking us to reduce capacity.”

The committee was told Brexit meant qualified foreign controllers now had to retrain, while other rules meant ex-UK military controllers also had to start from scratch, taking three years. Rolfe said Nats had only taken on the Gatwick contract in October 2022. “It was understaffed when we inherited it,” he said.