Industry figures are “quietly optimistic” disruption will be kept to a minimum over the Christmas-New Year holiday despite Iata director general Willie Walsh slamming UK air traffic control body Nats for its “appalling” performance.
Walsh hit out at Nats last week over its August bank holiday failure which “cost the industry hundreds of millions of pounds”, calling its response “very poor” and said: “Nats’ performance has been appalling.”
Iata noted airlines were forced to cancel more than 15,000 flights due to the failure and pointed out: “Only airlines are held responsible for delays.”
Walsh said: “We demand a better performance from Nats in 2024, but I’m not seeing any evidence of them addressing that.” He suggested: “We need a review of the regulatory model.”
Yet there are hopes the holiday season will pass without systemic disruption. A leading airline source said: “We’re quietly optimistic. We think the rostering will be sufficient. The big unknown is sickness. A bout of Covid or flu could go through teams, and there is a nasty Covid strain going around. Sickness is always a challenge in winter, but we’re hopeful we won’t see anything like the disruption previously.
“We see better preparedness and resourcing month by month and expect that to continue through to next year’s summer peak.”
However, the source noted European air traffic delays “continue to be a challenge”.
Ryanair repeated a call for the sacking of Nats chief Martin Rolfe, saying: “The Gatwick ATC system collapsed again today, delaying hundreds of flights and thousands of passengers.”
A Gatwick spokesperson confirmed “there was an outage to a local Nats system” but reported one flight cancelled and two diverted. Nats explained: “We had a technical issue that was quickly fixed. Departures were paused temporarily.”
The CAA has been holding regular meetings with Gatwick and Nats “to ensure resilience” amid a shortage of air traffic controllers at the airport. These meetings are due to continue until March. The CAA commissioned an independent review of the August meltdown at Nats which is due to report in January.