Ryanair’s O’Leary launches tirade against NATS after ’tissue of lies’ on air traffic failure
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary has launched a tirade against the boss of Britain’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS), describing the group’s report into August’s air traffic control disaster as “a complete tissue of nonsense.”
In a heated Transport Select Committee hearing this morning, airline bosses revealed the true extent of this summer’s unprecedented failure, in direct contradiction to NATS’s own account of the event.
Ryanair’s combative chief described the operator’s summary as a “tissue of lies, misinformation and NATS should be asked to explain it.”
O’Leary said the Dublin-based carrier — which accounts for approximately 20 per cent of the UK industry — had delayed 1,000 flights that day, despite NATS report claiming a total industry-wide figure of 575.
He also refuted NATS’s statement that the disaster had been a “one in 15 million failure” due to a duplicate waypoint from an unnamed airline.
O’Leary told MPs the budget airline had received written correspondence from other ATC providers that “they routinely and regularly receive flight plans that have duplicate waypoints in them.
“All of their systems are designed… to reject it and they deal with it manually. This is routine, it happens on a daily basis both within NATS and every other European ATC system,” he said.
“And yet on Monday 28 August, NATS collapsed their system.”
His stinging criticism, much of which was subsequently denied by the airspace operator, came after furious correspondence with NATS chief Martin Rolfe was revealed ahead of the meeting, in which O’Leary called for his resignation amid “mismanagement and incompetence”.
A host of airlines gave evidence to MPs this morning, including Easyjet, Loganair and the trade body Airlines UK.
Tim Alderslade, who heads up the lobby group, said the impact had been “unprecedented”, resulting in 1m minutes of delays and thousands of cancellations. “I don’t think this should be underestimated, the kind of impact this had on the sector.”
“I don’t think this should be underestimated, the kind of impact this had on the sector.”
Tim Alderslade, Airlines UK
Alderslade noted the communication from NATS had been “very poor” with Airlines UK, who represent a slew of carriers, not hearing from them formally “until the following day.”
The incident occurred at 8:30am in the morning, yet wasn’t resolved until 2:30pm and “we still had restrictions going at 6pm that evening. So it absolutely threw the entire UK aviation sector,” MPs heard.
One airline reportedly had half of their entire programme cancelled, with all flights operating that day suffering from delays.
O’Leary estimated the total cost for Ryanair to compensate passengers was around £15m and demanded this be repaid by NATS, whose stakeholders include airlines, pension funds and the UK government.
“Instead of paying £50m in dividends to your shareholders on an annual basis, you should be reimbursing the airlines for the right to care expenses that you inflicted upon us,” he said.
Nats remains firmly behind its preliminary report. Chief Rolfe told the committee the failure was “unlike any we’d seen before.”
“It was sufficiently unusual with not just duplicate waypoints, as you may have been informed earlier, but the combination of them, the sequence of them, and it was sufficiently different that the system decided the safest course of action was to stop processing and essentially allow a human to intervene,” he said.
He added: “That’s what happened. As a result of that, we reduced the flow of traffic in the skies over the UK, and that is simply to make sure that the air traffic controllers can safely handle what’s coming when they don’t have all the information.”