UK Air Traffic Chaos: Minister Calls NATS Outage 'Avoidable,' Orders Independent Review as Rolfe Keeps His Job

Since NATS' flight-processing system went down for roughly four hours on Tuesday afternoon, cancellations and delays have continued through a second full day, and now the impact has reached the House of Commons.

UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told MPs on Wednesday she does not believe the outage was unavoidable. "A four-hour air traffic outage yesterday left hundreds of thousands of passengers facing cancellations, diversions, and delays," Alexander said, according to Alliance News. "I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to passengers for this disruption."

Alexander said NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe told her the failure stemmed from a technical issue at the organization's Swanwick site, and that a cyberattack has been ruled out. She has ordered NATS to investigate and report back within one week, and separately asked the Civil Aviation Authority to conduct an independent review, due within six months, according to the BBC.

The numbers keep climbing

Aviation analytics firm Cirium said more than 2,000 flights were affected across Tuesday and Wednesday combined, with roughly 300 more cancellations or non-departures recorded Wednesday alone, per Alliance News. On a normal day, Cirium said, 1-2% of flights are cancelled. Wednesday's cancellation rate hit around 5% of the 5,869 scheduled flights, according to The National.

British Airways said it was forced to cancel almost 550 flights, affecting more than 85,000 passengers, calling the disruption "entirely out of our control," per Alliance News. Ryanair said 65,000 of its passengers were disrupted and more than 50 of its flights cancelled on Tuesday alone, a hit CNN reported cost the airline up to $4.06 million (£3 million), citing Reuters. Airlines UK, the trade body representing British carriers, put the total number of affected passengers above 330,000.

Rolfe stays, but airlines want him gone

Despite the government confirming it retains confidence in Rolfe, who has run NATS for 11 years, Wizz Air and Ryanair have both called for him to step down, according to the BBC. Breitbart reported one airline described him in blunter terms as an "overpaid failure." Ryanair also claimed the root cause matched the fault that triggered the 2023 meltdown, which stranded roughly 700,000 passengers over a bank holiday weekend. NATS denied that, telling The Guardian this week's fault was not the same as the ones in 2023 or a separate 2025 incident.

Rolfe, speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, apologized but dodged direct questions about resignation. "Inevitably, things do go wrong in complex systems," he said, according to The National. "I would say the UK has one of the best reputations in the world for its air traffic control service, both from a safety perspective and from a resilience perspective. I don't believe we've ever seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we've never seen in 50 years."

Airlines UK chief executive Tim Alderslade wrote to Alexander registering "serious concerns over yesterday's technical failure at NATS—the third major system failure in three years," and argued the current setup lets NATS avoid financial consequences while carriers eat the cost. "Accountability should sit where responsibility lies, and the Civil Aviation Bill offers the opportunity to address this," Alderslade said, according to the BBC. Alexander was scheduled to address that bill's second reading in the Commons the same day.

No compensation, most likely

The UK Civil Aviation Authority said the disruption is "likely to be considered the result of 'extraordinary circumstances'," meaning passengers are unlikely to be entitled to compensation for delays or cancellations directly caused by the incident, per the BBC. Airlines still must rebook and look after stranded passengers. British Airways has offered free rebooking through Friday.

The scale of the stranding produced its own knock-on crisis. Breitbart reported every hotel room within 25 miles of Rome was booked, London was similarly sold out, and a handful of remaining rooms were listed for as much as £10,000 a night. Alliance News relayed the case of 77-year-old Kevin Turner, who flew from Thailand to attend his daughter's wedding in Ischia, only to learn their Naples-bound flight was cancelled about an hour before they reached Heathrow.

Separately, questions about air traffic control staffing and accountability have surfaced in the U.S. this year too. The Wall Street Journal reported, and the Daily Wire covered, that federal aviation officials moved to fire two controllers who left LaGuardia's tower roughly an hour before their shifts ended in March, hours before an Air Canada Express jet collided with a firetruck on the runway, killing both pilots. That incident and its staffing fallout are unrelated to the NATS system failure, but both cases have put pressure on regulators to show that promises of accountability translate into actual consequences rather than statements.

NATS' own investigation is due back to Alexander within a week. The Civil Aviation Authority's independent review, covering the deeper resilience questions Airlines UK is pressing on, is not due for six months. Whether Rolfe is still running NATS when that report lands is, for now, an open question the government has declined to answer beyond its current statement of confidence.