Martin Rolfe, the chief executive of National Air Traffic Services (NATS), is facing renewed pressure over his position after a technical failure caused more than 2,000 flight cancellations and disrupted the journeys of hundreds of thousands of passengers.
The outage on Tuesday, September 8, affected the organisation’s flight-processing system and led to severe disruption at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted and other airports. Although NATS restored the system, airlines were left dealing with cancelled services, displaced aircraft and crews, and a backlog that continued into Wednesday.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has ordered Rolfe to provide a full report within a week. She also commissioned an independent review by the Civil Aviation Authority into what happened and whether NATS has the resilience required to run the UK’s air traffic control system.
Ms Alexander told MPs that a cyber attack had been ruled out but said she did not believe the incident was unavoidable. Downing Street said the Government still had confidence in Rolfe, who met the Transport Secretary on Wednesday.
Pressure mounts on NATS chief after repeated failures
The latest breakdown is the third major disruption overseen by Rolfe in just over three years. A system failure in August 2023 brought Britain’s airspace close to a standstill on one of the busiest weekends of the year, while a separate incident last year resulted in more than 150 cancelled flights.
The 2023 failure affected about 700,000 passengers and was estimated to have cost the aviation industry at least £65 million. NATS described it at the time as an exceptionally rare event and promised that lessons would be learned.
Airlines have now questioned whether those assurances were acted upon. Yvonne Moynihan, managing director of Wizz Air UK, said that three failures should prompt a change in leadership, while Ryanair called for Rolfe to resign.
British Airways said the latest incident had forced it to cancel almost 550 flights, affecting more than 85,000 customers. The airline described the disruption as extremely frustrating and stressed that it had been outside its control.
NATS has said the latest problem was different from the failures that caused disruption in 2023 and 2025. Rolfe has apologised to passengers and said he understood their frustration, while insisting that the organisation would take responsibility for investigating the breakdown.
Industry estimates indicated that about 330,000 passengers were affected, including more than 155,000 whose flights were cancelled and more than 180,000 who experienced delays.
£1.4 million pay package under scrutiny
The crisis has also put renewed focus on Rolfe’s remuneration. The NATS chief received £1.418 million in pay and bonuses last year, taking his earnings over the past five years to about £6.187 million.
His package includes a salary of about £650,000, together with pension benefits and performance-related payments. It is almost ten times the Prime Minister’s salary and considerably higher than the pay of comparable air traffic control executives elsewhere in Europe.
NATS is responsible for managing the aircraft movements of around 8,000 scheduled flights a day through 15 UK airports. The company employs more than 5,000 people and charges airlines and passengers for the services it provides.
Its latest accounts showed a profit of about £165.9 million. NATS also paid substantial dividends to shareholders, including the Government, which retains a 49 per cent stake in the company.
Critics argue that the scale of the payments and dividends raises questions about whether enough has been invested in the organisation’s underlying technology. The core flight-processing infrastructure has been described by aviation experts as ageing, with parts of the system still relying on COBOL, a programming language developed in the 1950s.
NATS has previously faced criticism over controller shortages and its use of remote working arrangements. During the 2023 breakdown, an engineer responsible for responding to the failure was reportedly working from home and took about 90 minutes to reach the office after struggling to access the system remotely.
The Civil Aviation Authority said NATS would submit a technical report on the latest incident. It also said passengers should continue to receive care, including food, refreshments and accommodation where appropriate, although they were unlikely to qualify for compensation because the disruption was expected to fall within the category of “extraordinary circumstances”.
With the Government review under way and the airline industry demanding accountability, the future of Britain’s best-paid transport quangocrat now depends on whether the latest failure is judged to have been an unforeseeable technical event — or evidence of a deeper failure of leadership.
