Jet2 air traffic control disruption rippled across the UK on Tuesday after Nats shut down its system for four hours, grounding thousands of flights and forcing more than 2,000 cancellations. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected, and some inbound flights were diverted or landed in Germany.
Heidi Alexander summoned Martin Rolfe to a meeting on Wednesday and gave him a week to report on the causes of the shutdown. She also commissioned an independent review by the Civil Aviation Authority, while the outage was described as the most serious to affect British commercial airspace since August 2023.
Martin Rolfe and Nats
Martin Rolfe ruled out a cyber-attack, saying he believes we’ve never seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation
. Kathryn Leahy said the flight processing system did not have a dedicated backup because Nats was in the midst of a complete overhaul of its systems
.
Leahy also said duplicating the amount of data Nats keeps would cost vast amounts
. Nats operations staff called the managers of numerous airports and airlines as the shutdown spread through the day, and some aircraft full of passengers were left waiting for information for more than four hours.
Heidi Alexander and the CAA
The government response moved quickly once the scale of the disruption became clear. Heidi Alexander said, I did not believe the issue was unavoidable
, and the Civil Aviation Authority was asked to carry out an independent review of the incident.
The latest failure lands after the August 2023 technical problem that delayed almost 1,600 flights and prompted 34 recommendations from the CAA, all of which were said to have been fully implemented. That earlier episode now frames the pressure on Nats to explain why a second major outage reached passengers and airlines again.
Ministry of Defence response
Four people briefed on the incident said the shutdown was caused by a flight plan submitted by a UK military aircraft, and the system was said to have been hit by spurious flight data. The Ministry of Defence said it did not believe there was any indication of an error on the part of the military, and it said further comment would be inappropriate until the Nats investigation had concluded.
Michael O’Leary pushed the dispute further, accusing Rolfe of telling lies to save his own skin
and saying his position was untenable. He added: We don’t need more investigations, we don’t need more reports and we don’t need another parliamentary committee hearing where Martin Rolfe will promise change, will promise resilience and will promise an effective backup system.
Passengers affected by the delays are unlikely to be able to claim compensation because the disruption was caused by extraordinary circumstances, not a routine schedule problem. What remains now is the specific technical path from a military flight plan inside the Nats system to a shutdown that lasted four hours.
