Leading UK airlines have accused national air traffic control body Nats of failing to inform them of the shutdown of its system on August bank holiday Monday.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary and easyJet chief commercial officer Sophie Dekkers told the Transport Select Committee of MPs the carriers were only notified of the issue by European air navigation safety organisation Eurocontrol soon after 11:00 on August 28.
MPs were told the Nats system shut down at about 08:30. However, Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe told the committee: “That is how the system is supposed to work.
“As soon as we know something is happening, we tell Eurocontrol and they tell everybody else. Eurocontrol is the mechanism [for notifying the airlines].”
The Nats shutdown caused serious delays to hundreds of thousands of passengers, and airlines are demanding Nats compensate them for the cost of providing care and assistance to passengers.
O’Leary told the committee: “Nats collapsed its system [and] we didn’t hear from Nats at all. We spent £15 million on passengers’ expenses.
“We wrote to Martin Rolfe to ask for reimbursement and got a reply that it’s not in Nats’ remit.”
When MPs referred to a Which? report accusing carriers of failing to rebook passengers on alternative flights or to provide hotel accommodation, O’Leary dismissed it as “a distraction” and “misinformation from Which?”
He said: “If we have 63,000 passengers stranded, can we put them all up on a bank holiday Monday? No, we can’t. Were passengers disrupted? Yes. Did it sometimes take days to repatriate them? Yes, because our flights were full.
“The problem on August 28 was that all other airlines were grounded.”
O’Leary pointed out: “The government owns 49% of Nats. It could direct Nats to reimburse these costs.”
Dekkers agreed, saying: “The first we heard from Nats was by letter the following day. We had 599 flights cancelled and 110,000 passengers impacted.”
She noted that providing flights for 110,000 passengers “would require 100 aircraft and we simply don’t have those at that time of year”.
Dekkers estimated easyJet’s costs of assisting passengers as “similar to Ryanair’s”, but said: “The full costs would be multiple times that.”
Airlines UK chief executive Tim Alderslade told MPs: “Half the entire [flying] programme was cancelled and the half that operated had delays. It was unprecedented.”
He accused Nats of “poor communication”, saying: “I didn’t hear from them till the following morning. I heard about it first from Sky News.”
Alderslade added: “We wrote to Nats asking for repayment of the costs but have not had a response.”
He noted both transport secretary Mark Harper and the CAA “acknowledged the airlines did everything they could” to assist passengers.
Rolfe blamed “an incredibly unusual flight plan” for the system shutdown and told the committee: “We resolved it as quickly as we could. I apologise to everyone. It was our problem and our responsibility. I understand the frustration of the airlines.”
He insisted: “We fixed this problem, so it won’t happen again.”
CAA chief executive Rob Bishton told MPs: “The airline response was good. We saw airlines perform beyond their obligations, in many cases beyond what we would expect as a regulator.”
He added: “We believe Nats has been open and transparent with us. It was an extraordinary event.”
An independent panel, set up by the CAA, is due to investigate and report on the incident and response of Nats and the airlines.