Air traffic controllers have been dubbed the heart of the airport for their vital and challenging role in keeping flights running safely and efficiently.
So when Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary demanded the resignation of Martin Rolfe, the head of Britain’s National Air Traffic Services (Nats), his remarks came as a shock.
O’Leary’s ultimatum followed an IT failure during last year’s August bank holiday that ruined the summer’s last holiday weekend for tens of thousands of people.
The Ryanair chief claimed that a policy of allowing Nats engineers to work from home meant they were “sat watching Football Focus in their jim jams” at the time of the outage.
O’Leary went on to compare Nats – which runs the airspace over Britain and the whole of the eastern Atlantic, as well as controlling flights at the country’s busiest airports – to Dad’s Army, and said that it was “short-staffed every summer”.
He added: “It comes back to the same complacent mismanagement and an overpaid, underworked, ineffective CEO who should, in any properly functioning country, resign or be booted out.”
The remarks, though cutting, were not out of character for the outspoken Ryanair boss. Yet in the past month Nats has come in for more criticism from airlines that are generally far less willing to show their heads above the parapet.
Nats boss Martin Rolfe has so far resisted calls to step down - Dorset Media Service / Alamy Stock Photo
EasyJet and British Airways have joined the revolt, blaming Nats for what they say is an increase in delays and cancellations that has left them scrambling to fulfil timetables in the final weeks of the lucrative summer season.
Nats has hit back, saying the increased disruption stems mostly from a 4.4pc increase in the number of UK travellers compared with last year, combined with a particularly wet and stormy summer season.
For passengers caught in the middle, however, the row translates into hours spent waiting at airports, often followed by missed connections and a tortuous trip home or to their hotel.
Johan Lundgren, EasyJet chief executive, was the first to follow O’Leary in demanding a change in Nats’s leadership in a letter to its board in early September, which was later leaked to the media.
Lundgren accused Rolfe, who took on the top job in Nats in 2015 and received ￡1.3m in pay and benefits last year, of playing down issues over the past two years and providing misleading information about anticipated levels of disruption.
He wrote: “I am deeply concerned by the ongoing failure of the CEO to recognise the scale of the problem and to communicate honestly about it.”
EasyJet, which relies on Nats for almost half its flights, told The Telegraph that staffing issues meant Gatwick airport was prone to delays, though it noted some recent improvement.
A spokesman said: “We continue to see situations where it only takes two staff members to be absent for flights to be cancelled. We continue to urge Nats to provide transparency on service levels and ensure they have a robust plan to tackle any resilience issues.”
Then, less than two weeks ago, British Airways joined the fray with a letter to staff that blamed Nats for the failure of many of its jets to get away from Heathrow on Sept 26, despite being granted an operating extension after weather-related delays.
The letter from two senior executives read: “The primary driver of this was air traffic delays to departing flights, which left us with no choice but to cancel those flights at late notice. This was incredibly frustrating for us and tough on our customers.”
BA also revealed that 42pc of its services had been hit by interventions from Nats so far in 2024, a sharp rise from the 24pc recorded in 2019, the most recent year to see a similar number of flights.
Wizz Air, which has a base at Gatwick, said Nats-related issues contributed to almost 300,000 minutes of delays across its network in July and August.
Marion Geoffroy, the UK managing director, said: “This summer was continuously challenging from an air traffic control perspective.”
However, she added: “After a difficult start we did see some improvement and we hope this trend continues.”
From the outside at least, it would seem Britain’s biggest airlines are now in open warfare with the head of a regulator meant to ensure the smooth passage of planes above our heads.
Nats has generally been reluctant to defend itself openly. It is a public-private partnership owned by the Government, pension funds and airlines, including easyJet and BA, meaning it prefers to keep a low profile that won’t upset the apple cart.
However, stung by the latest rebukes, Nats told The Telegraph that it has been directly responsible for only a small proportion of hold-ups. In fact, it claimed that reliability has markedly improved. Instead, it blamed stormy weather over summer for the increase in disruption – something it has no control over.
Despite handling the highest proportion of traffic in Europe, Nats has been responsible for fewer than 1.5pc of the delays in the region, it said, citing figures from Eurocontrol.
Moreover, 98pc of flights in UK airspace since April have experienced no Nats-attributable delay, it claimed, and even where there were hold-ups the average delay has been no more than 15 minutes.
The organisation also shot back at airlines, seeming to suggest that they had overfilled schedules to unrealistic levels.
It said: “Nats does not manage airline schedules. We share as much information as we can with the airlines and it is then up to them to decide what changes to make to their operation.
“We hold a daily ‘lookahead call’ to give as much information as we have on the following day and the potential impact that anything such as weather or capacity constraints may have so that operators can take that info away to help their planning.”
Nats also rejected suggestions that it is short of personnel following Covid, when the grounding of most flights led many senior personnel across the aviation sector to retire.
It said: “Nats does not have a staffing crisis. We have the correct numbers of controllers and engineers in our centres and at major airports.”
The only exception, it said, is in the control tower at Gatwick. Even there, performance has improved as more new staff complete the two years of training required to oversee takeoffs and landings at the world’s busiest single-runway hub, Nats said.
A spokesman added: “Everyone knew we had inherited a shortage of controllers that would take time to fix. We have a full training pipeline in place and are now close to the right number of fully valid controllers.”
A Nats insider said the firm had a full complement of staff on duty at the time of the BA upheaval, and pointed out that a weather advisory had been sent out the day before “with big red letters in the middle of it saying: there will be disruption tomorrow.”
A British Airways source rejected Nats’s version of event, saying performance was “deteriorating, not improving”.
Another source at EasyJet said the airline regards Nats’s exclusion of weather and flight capacity issues when addressing its responsibility for delays as highly selective, pointing out that Nats-related delays that have affected 2pc flights since April still impacted tens of thousands of passengers.
A spokesman declined to elaborate on the legal case but said it endorsed BA’s criticism and urged the carrier, as a Nats board member, to insist on management changes.
Michael O’Leary, Ryanair chief executive, has been Nats’s most vocal critic - Brian Lawless/PA Wire
John Strickland, an aviation consultant and former network planner at British Airways, said constraints on flights at UK airports have served to worsen the situation.
Gatwick, where easyJet is the biggest carrier, has very little slack built into its operations because of the single runway, he said, while BA’s dominant position at Heathrow, which is also close to capacity, means that it suffers disproportionately from any disruption.
Ryanair relies on quick airport turnarounds to deliver its low fares, while its exposure to Mediterranean routes means that air traffic control issues further south – including regular strikes among controllers in France – very quickly throw its schedule into chaos.
Rolfe’s position appears precarious. However, Warren East, the former boss of Rolls-Royce who took over as chairman of Nats last month, has said he’s happy that his chief executive is doing everything possible to address outstanding issues.
Strickland said that ditching Rolfe, who holds a masters degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Southampton, would offer no guarantee of improvement.
He said: “It’s easy to cry ‘off with his head’, but getting round the table and analysing procedures in the cold light of day and seeing how Nats can function better in a pressure cooker environment might be the better approach.”
