Airlines stepped up their criticism of Britain's aviation systems Wednesday after a major air traffic control failure stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers, while ministers summoned the head of flight control to explain the shutdown.
Flights resumed at major airports across the country after the hours-long outage Tuesday, which resulted in the cancelation of 2,000 flights and ramped up pressure on air traffic control provider NATS and its boss Martin Rolfe.
Ryanair said NATS had told it that the cause of the shutdown was the same problem behind the last major air traffic outage in 2023, which cost airlines 100 million pounds ($135 million). The carrier has repeatedly called for Rolfe to step down.
Transport minister Heidi Alexander will later Wednesday hear directly from Rolfe after she summoned him to explain the fault, amid concerns over the resilience of the infrastructure and technology.
The NATS shutdown in August 2023 caused travel chaos, and there was also a radar-related technical issue in July 2025, which affected major airports including Britain's largest, Heathrow.
