Ryanair has called for the immediate resignation of NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe after a fresh air traffic control system failure tore through UK & London airspace on Tuesday, 8 September.
In a strongly worded statement issued today, the airline said more than 65,000 of its passengers faced delays of up to eight hours, with over 50 scheduled flights cancelled outright.
The disruption struck London Heathrow particularly hard.
As The Aviation Hub reported in its rolling coverage of the chaos, a bird strike on runway 27R briefly halted arrivals shortly after 11:00 BST before a separate technical failure in the departure system froze outbound traffic entirely from 12:48 BST.
Departures did not resume until 13:35 BST, and airlines were still working through high calculated takeoff times into the early evening as crews and aircraft were repositioned across a backlog that built through the afternoon.
Second Major Failure In Three Years In London & In The UK…
For Ryanair, Tuesday’s meltdown is not an isolated event but the latest chapter in a pattern it says stretches back to NATS’ catastrophic system collapse in August 2023, when a single corrupted flight plan grounded flights across the country for an entire day.
Tuesday’s failure, he argued, proves otherwise.
McMahon did not hold back in his criticism of Rolfe personally, describing him as an “overpaid failure” and questioning how many more system collapses passengers would have to endure before he accepted responsibility and stepped down.
Rising Charges, Falling Reliability In UK & London…
Central to Ryanair’s complaint is the gap between what airlines pay for UK air traffic control and what they receive in return.
The airline pointed out that NATS charges, which are ultimately funded by carriers and their passengers, have climbed 28 per cent since 2022 even as service reliability has continued to falter.
Ryanair also highlighted that Rolfe receives bonuses exceeding £1.4 million a year, a figure it contrasted sharply with Tuesday’s disruption to tens of thousands of travellers.
Calls For Leadership Change
Ryanair used the statement to press the UK Government, the Civil Aviation Authority and the NATS Board directly, urging them to stop making excuses for repeated failures and to install leadership capable of running a UK air traffic control system without recurring breakdowns.
The airline framed the issue as one affecting far more than its own operation, noting that families travelling on holiday, business travellers and visitors arriving in the UK all bore the cost of Tuesday’s outage.
NATS has not yet issued a public response to Ryanair’s call for Rolfe to resign.
The full scale of Tuesday’s disruption across UK airspace, beyond Ryanair’s own passenger numbers, is still becoming clear as airlines report their own delay and cancellation figures.
Continue to follow The Aviation Hub for more analysis and insight!
