Ryanair’s O’Leary accuses UK air traffic control boss of lying over outage

Ryanair's CEO Michael O'Leary has accused NATS, the British air traffic control operator, of lying about the cause of an outage that resulted in thousands of flight cancellations earlier this week. O'Leary said Ryanair had been informed by NATS that the issue stemmed from a rogue flight plan, similar to a problem that caused a major disruption in 2023.

However, NATS CEO Martin Rolfe claimed that this latest incident had been caused by something different from the previous occurrences. O'Leary, who has repeatedly called for Rolfe's resignation, dismissed Rolfe's explanation, stating that he believed the CEO was lying to protect his position. A previous NATS investigation into the 2023 outage concluded that it was caused by a one in 15 million event where a flight plan contained two identical waypoints, resulting in both the system and its backup entering a fail-safe mode.

In response to O'Leary's recent comments, NATS stated that the current outage was caused by a different issue and did not immediately comment on O'Leary's latest allegations. Ryanair is currently suing NATS in London's High Court for over £7 million over the 2023 outage and has demanded the operator reinvest profits into performance improvements and staffing.

The UK government has given Rolfe a week to investigate the cause of the latest system failure, and Transport Minister Heidi Alexander, who met with Rolfe over the incident, believes the outage was preventable and has requested an independent review by the Civil Aviation Authority.