The last few days have shown it once again, air transport is at the mercy of natural hazards as well as technological or human failures. The eruption in Indonesia of the volcano Anak Krakatau Sunday 6 September disrupted the Asian skies, certainly to a lesser extent than the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland and the more than 100,000 flights cancelled in April 2010 due to the ash plume which could damage or even shut down aircraft engines in flight. Seven Indonesian airports brought to a standstill, 3,000 flights cancelled including more than a hundred international routes, 340,000 passengers affected: the incident was not without consequences for travel in the region on Monday 7th, before a gradual return to normal the following day.
Two days of disruption: that is also what the United Kingdom went through in the middle of the week. Not for reasons beyond human control, but due to an air traffic control system malfunction. A breakdown occurred at the British air traffic control service provider NATS (National Air Traffic Services); specifically, a technical problem at its Swanwick site, detected around 1.30pm and gradually resolved before early evening, which prevented the departure of flights at numerous airports from London to Dublin, via those in Birmingham, Edinburgh and Liverpool.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of passengers found themselves caught up in the disruption, with passengers forced to disembark, congested terminals... In total, according to Cirium, more than 1,700 flights were cancelled last Tuesday and at least another 400 on Wednesday with a «ripple» effect, as aircraft and crews had to be repositioned following the previous day's disruption, and a few more still this Thursday.
While British Airways announced that around one hundred of its flights had been cancelled or diverted, Ryanair was undoubtedly the worst affected airline with over 200 flights cancelled and 150,000 of its passengers impacted. This was enough to infuriate the airline, which wasted no time in calling for the resignation of Martin Rolfe, the CEO of NATS. « How many more failures will passengers have to endure before Martin Rolfe, the failed and overpaid CEO of NATS, takes responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns? », said Neal McMahon, Ryanair's Chief Operating Officer, for whom the matter is clear: « It is time he left ".
Accountability for NATS
Without going quite that far, the company Wizz Air estimates that ’ urgent reform of NATS is necessary in view of the government's ambition to expand UK airspace capacity ». Because this failure of air traffic control services is not a first. This latest breakdown follows another technical incident in July 2025 and, above all, a major disruption in August 2023, once again right in the middle of the holiday season. With the resulting effect of 2,000 cancelled flights and 700,000 affected passengers.
At the same time, the cost of this event for the airlines came to around a hundred million pounds in compensation, since these «extraordinary circumstances» leave them bearing the cost of payouts. An unjust system according to the association Airlines UK, with airlines therefore paying « the price of mistakes made by others, whilst the responsible organisations suffer few, if any, financial consequences », said its Chief Executive, Tim Alderslade, for whom « Responsibility should lie with those who are in charge, and the Civil Aviation Bill offers the opportunity to address this. "
" We would like to reiterate our apologies to everyone affected – passengers, airlines and airports – for the technical issue that occurred yesterday within our system » : NATS held its hands up following the disruption caused. But how can these repeat incidents be avoided now? Following the major breakdown in 2023, an independent investigation report commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority made around thirty recommendations to improve the management of British air traffic.
Same again: the UK Civil Aviation Authority has asked NATS for a full report and will examine whether further measures are needed to improve the reliability of the country's air traffic control.« While the immediate priority is to provide support to customers, as this is not the first NATS failure to cause widespread disruption, Luke Petherbridge, PR director of the ABTA association, had stated as early as Tuesday, the sector and the public will want answers as to what went wrong, the lessons learned, and how the system will be made more resilient to prevent this from happening again. »
