Bosses at Ryanair and Wizz Air have called for the chief of Britain’s beleaguered air traffic control provider to resign amid claims the latest meltdown was a repeat of an issue that triggered a similar outage three years ago.
Passengers endured another day of travel chaos today after nearly 300 flights in and out of Britain were axed – with warnings the disruption could last for three weeks.
Neal McMahon, Ryanair’s chief operating officer, said the NATS failure was caused by ‘exactly the same issue’ that brought the system to a standstill three years ago.
In 2023, more than 700,000 passengers faced disruption and flights were grounded after air traffic control suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.
Mr McMahon said it was ‘absolutely’ the right time for the Government to ask NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign. Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary added that his position had become ‘untenable’ due to ‘repeated failings’.
Wizz Air UK managing director Yvonne Moynihan echoed these calls and said there were ‘serious questions about the resilience’ of the UK’s air traffic control service.
NATS claimed yesterday’s incident was ‘not the same issue’ as in 2023, adding that it would be ‘conducting a full investigation’ – and Mr Rolfe found support from Downing Street today after a spokesperson said he still has the confidence of the Government.
Aviation analytics company Cirium said as of at 11.30am today, 291 flights had been cancelled for the day – which was around 5 per cent of the 5,869 scheduled.
On a normal day, between 1 to 2 per cent of flights are cancelled. So far, across today and yesterday, more than 2,000 flights have been impacted following the fault.
So far, up to 250,000 travellers at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted have been affected by yesterday’s air traffic control system failure.
Australian actress Rebel Wilson was among those stranded at Heathrow last night and shared videos of herself walking through the terminal looking exhausted.
Sky Sports Formula 1 broadcaster Martin Brundle said last night he had been stuck on a plane at Heathrow for ‘nine hours’ and had travelled nowhere – with the toilets on the aircraft having become blocked and no food being offered to passengers.
Passengers ask for information at Heathrow today as disruption continues
Holidaymakers sleep on the floor at Gatwick in the early hours of this morning
Australian actress Rebel Wilson was among the passengers stranded at Heathrow last night
He tweeted: ‘Great work BA and Heathrow. Nine hours and counting sitting on a plane which has travelled nowhere. At a remote parking bay, no food throughout.
‘Mother and baby and a person with a medical condition desperate to get off. As is everyone else. Toilets no longer available as blocked.’
At Heathrow’s Terminal 4, passengers slept on yoga mats on the floor overnight as they awaited updates on their flight.
Patrick Weston, 45, of Enfield, north London, was planning to fly out to Gothenburg in Sweden today but his service was cancelled.
He told the Daily Mail: ‘It’s absolute chaos here. You cannot believe this can keep happening in Britain in 2026 with all the technology we have. It was a mini break for me. I have no idea what is happening. There’s just a feeling of helplessness.
‘It shouldn’t be like this in this day and age. That’s the frustrating part. Of course, things go wrong. But this is just a regular occurrence now. I am stranded now.’
Clara Nguyen, 28, and her boyfriend, Lihan Chen, 25, both students in Leeds, were booked on a flight from Heathrow to Ho Chi Minh City yesterday evening which is now expected to depart this afternoon.
They spent the night in an Airbnb which they paid for themselves. Ms Nguyen said: ‘The airport tried to help but the service and information from Air Vietnam were poor.’
Engineer Felix Abrams, 29, was on his way to Beijing to visit his girlfriend’s family. He said the way he had been treated was ‘demeaning’ and that there had been ‘a complete shirking of responsibility’.
He added: ‘How was the airport not prepared for this? This failure has happened before. It’s not our fault. We’re not being told anything.’
Another passenger, who did not wish to be identified, told the Daily Mail that she arrived at Malaga Airport yesterday for a flight home to Manchester and boarded on time.
But she continued: ‘As soon as the doors were closed we were told there was an issue with air traffic control in London and we would be delayed for about one hour and 20 minutes.
‘After about half an hour the pilot apologised and said he had an update that wasn’t good news – we would be delayed another five hours minimum, so we had to return to the terminal.
‘After waiting for steps and buses, we got off and were taken back inside the terminal, then told nothing and left to our own devices. Those with checked baggage had to retrieve that too. No easyJet staff to direct or assist, no information, desks closed – some people without phones were totally lost.’
She added that trying to rebook flights on the app was ‘impossible’ because it was not working, with other airlines showing no flights until at least Monday.
The woman also said: ‘My husband has a hospital procedure on Saturday, we don’t have enough medications with us to last beyond Thursday and I’m supposed to be back in work tomorrow. Nightmare.’
A co-creator of The Walking Dead cartoon said British Airways cut off its phone lines after wait times reached two hours.
Cartoonist Charlie Adlard, 60, was travelling from his home in Shrewsbury to a comic book convention in Palermo, Sicily, but decided to turn around after ‘hanging around in the hotel room for hours’.
He said in Heathrow Terminal 5: ‘Due to the lack of information, due to everything crashing now, due to the fact that apparently BA have now switched off their customer service phone number because there’s so many calls, we’re not really sure what to do.’
He said a member of staff at the airport told him BA’s customer service desk is behind security, which Mr Adlard said: ‘Makes no sense, so you’ve got to go through security, then they’ve got you, haven’t they? They’ve trapped you in there.’
He said he had lost more than a day of work because of the disruption, spent money on a nearby hotel when ‘for some reason it was a really expensive day’, and had to pay for dinner and a hotel breakfast, adding: ‘So yeah, I’ve lost quite a bit of money on this rather wasteful journey.’
Asked what he thinks of BA reportedly closing its phone lines, he said: ‘I think that’s madness, that’s customer service?’
A couple travelling to Lisbon and then on to the Azores to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary almost fell victim to a scam after a fraudster pretending to work for BA tried to offer them alternative flights from London City, Gatwick or Heathrow airports and via Munich.
Speaking from a packed Caffe Nero in Heathrow Terminal 5, Geoff and Janina McBride, from Hampshire, said they called a phone number on what they thought was the official BA website.
While Mr McBride was trying to make a new payment for hundreds of pounds, his wife became suspicious and phoned their bank, who said ‘get off the phone to them immediately’, he said, adding: ‘So they blocked my credit card, cancelled all these things.’
The former government nanotechnology scientist, who made ‘tiny technologies that went to the moon’, said: ‘What do you do when you’re in a drama?
‘I’m very well-versed in cybersecurity, but it’s that one click, isn’t it?
‘And it looked legitimate, proper, he sounded proper, he was going through all the different flights, had all the details, so he can pull that off the internet and speak to me down the phone, credit card details – so I was lucky, very lucky.’
Mr McBride said they had tried to book false tickets worth £600 each, adding that the fraudster ‘tried to get different flights but couldn’t get the credit card to work’ and that ‘we were in a panic – that’s when they get you’.
A bride-to-be and her 77-year-old father are stranded in Heathrow Airport, trying to figure out how to get to her wedding in Italy that has been planned for two years.
About an hour before they arrived at the airport in a taxi early this morning, they were told their Naples-bound flight had been cancelled – now they hope to travel to Gatwick, fly to Milan, catch another flight to Naples early on Thursday and then a boat to Ischia.
The wedding is on Sunday, but events start on Friday with a welcome to their friends, who have already arrived.
Passengers at Heathrow Terminal Four slept on yoga mats on the floor overnight
People arrive with their luggage at the North Terminal of London Gatwick Airport this morning
Passengers wait for flights at Gatwick’s South Terminal this morning
Grandfather Kevin Turner travelled to the UK from Thailand for the ceremony, and said: ‘We’ve been delayed and unfortunately my daughter’s been emotionally disturbed because she’s been organising this for the last two years and, with her husband-to-be, we’re looking forward to meeting all the family and they’re doing it in Italy because it’s so romantic.’
He added: ‘I’m based in Thailand, I’m dad and granddad, I’ve come all the way from Thailand just for this wedding and I can’t walk properly because I had a bad operation a couple of years ago – so this will probably be the last time I’ll be able to make this trip, it’s like a golden opportunity and I feel a little bit let down.
‘That’s all I’ve got to say and let’s just keep out fingers crossed that we can get out of here tonight, we’re only a day late – but a day’s a lot.’
Also at Heathrow today, personal trainer Cathy Smith and her partner Jack Clark, a couple from Baltimore, were returning from Lisbon when their BA flight was caught up in the chaos.
Ms Smith said: ‘We were on the Tarmac for four hours. Staff gave us rigatoni and chicken curry and water, but they didn’t know what was happening.’
Mr Clark explained that because they had had no signal on the grounded plane, they had been unable to call ahead to book a hotel room.
He added: ‘By the time passengers were asked to disembark the flight in the evening there were no hotels available for 30 miles. We spent the night on chairs in the airport and are hoping to fly this afternoon.’
Jose, his son Mattius 16, friends Hugo 16, Berta 16, and Mattius’s brother Marquel, 10, were waiting to fly back to Spain after a holiday in London.
The teenagers said that Air Iberia paid for last night in a hotel but is not offering compensation for the next two nights. Their outbound flight is now scheduled for Friday.
Marquel said: ‘The hotel was comfortable but the food wasn’t very tasty. There were lots of people from our flight there so it was packed.’
Mattius added: ‘The airport didn’t help us at all. Apart from that we enjoyed our trip to London, we were here for four days seeing the sights.’
Ffriends Sandra Achampong, 30, Jane Asamoah, 31, and Sarah Appiah, 31, were on their way to west Africa when they got caught up in the chaos. They were on a grounded flight at Gatwick due to depart at 11am that stayed on the Tarmac until 6pm.
‘There were people on that flight I feel really sorry for,’ he said. ‘A woman who was going to bury her father, and another woman who was getting married. She and the photographer were on the flight, all of them are still stuck here. And there were lots of kids, they did well.’
Sandra, Jane, and Sarah received an email from BA with instructions for overnight accommodation, requiring them to pay upfront and receive compensation later.
Because this was expensive upfront, they accepted a transfer to Heathrow arriving at 1am and spending the night in the airport.
Jane said: ‘It was like an asylum centre. There was a woman and child sleeping on a luggage trolley. A boy was opening people’s suitcases and chucking stuff on the ground.
‘We haven’t been given any food vouchers and were only given cheese and crackers on the plane.’
The trio have lost two days of their holiday where they were looking forward to catching up with family and being pampered.
‘We already paid for the massages, hair, nails, everything,’ said Sarah, ‘It charged our cards.’ They expect to arrive tomorrow after a transfer in Johannesburg.
Over at London Stansted, Tihana Kovacevic, 50, from Croatia, 50, was waiting at the airport after her friend had her flight cancelled.
She said: ‘My friend was like, ‘Oh my God, my flight has been cancelled.’ She’s in Frankfurt or somewhere else. I don’t know where she is. She was calling me.
‘Originally, she needed to transit from Croatia to Germany; we’re both from Croatia. I had to catch my train; we were supposed to meet and get a coffee. I was in a shuttle when she called and said, ‘No, I’m not alright. My flight has been cancelled!’.’
It comes as Mr Rolfe was clinging to his job today amid a showdown with Ms Alexander.
Downing Street said Mr Rolfe still has the confidence of the Government.
Asked about the severe disruption at airports across the country, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman told reporter today: ‘You’ve seen this morning that the Transport Secretary met the chief of National Air Traffic Service to raise significant concerns at the scale of disruption on behalf of both passengers and industry.
‘She’s asked him to carry out a full investigation into what happened to make sure that lessons are learned, so that this doesn’t happen again. She set a deadline for them to report back in a week’s time.
‘And through our Civil Aviation Bill, which returns to Parliament today, we will make sure air passengers get stronger protection of rights around cancellations, delays, and passenger support.’
Asked whether Ms Alexander and Andy Burnham still have confidence in Mr Rolfe, the spokesman said: ‘Well, you’ve got the Transport Secretary’s instruction to the NATS CEO.
‘I think it’s self-evident that she wants answers and the full investigation to be reported back in a week’s time, and she’s got confidence in him to deliver that.’
Pressed whether this meant the Government’s confidence in the head of air traffic control was conditional on the outcome of the investigation, the spokesman replied: ‘We have confidence in him and he’s been tasked with the investigation, which will report in a week’s time.’
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Rolfe apologised for the issue but dodged questions over whether he would quit.
He said: ‘Inevitably, things do go wrong in complex systems. We never want them to. We always hope they won’t, but we absolutely plan for them to and make sure we handle them properly.’
Mr Rolfe added: ‘I would say the UK has one of the best reputations in the world for its air traffic control service, both from a safety perspective and from a resilience perspective.
‘NATS was actually a partial privatisation 25 years ago, and since that point, it’s had access to funding.
‘We’ve invested way more than a billion in technology over that time, our service has consistently improved. Our safety is consistently improved from a very good base.
‘But all of those things don’t detract from the fact that when these things happen, it is disappointing and upsetting, for which I apologise.’
On the cause of the problem, Mr Rolfe said a ‘thorough’ investigation would take place, but ruled out a cyber attack.
He added: ‘My focus and that of the team has been on both getting our system operating back up normally, which it is now, but there’s obviously a huge tail to the disruption and we’ll be working on that through the course of today.
Passengers sleep on the floor at Gatwick’s South Terminal this morning
Check-in queues lie empty at Gatwick’s South Terminal this morning
Travellers sleep as they wait for flights at Gatwick’s South Terminal this morning
Passengers rest with their luggage at Gatwick’s North Terminal today
‘And then our attention will turn to exactly what’s happened in this particular incident.
‘What I will say is, I don’t believe we’ve ever seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation.’
Discussing the response to yesterday’s incident, Mr Rolfe said: ‘We had everybody on site, everybody was in the right place. We had all the engineers in place. We had our various partners from software industries and so on all on hand.
‘So this was resolved as quickly as it could be, but within the limits of making sure that it all stayed safe.’
Ryanair said more than 65,000 of its passengers had been disrupted and it had cancelled more than 50 scheduled flights.
British Airways said it had ‘no choice’ but to cancel more than 190 flights today following the Nats issue.
In a statement this morning, the company said: ‘Our teams have worked throughout the night to build a new flight schedule for today so we’re able to operate as many flights as we can, following the significant disruption we experienced yesterday as a result of the Nats outage.
‘With so many planes and crew out of place, we were left with no choice but to cancel more than 190 flights of today’s original planned schedule.
‘While this incident has been completely outside of our control, we do not underestimate the impact it’s had on the tens of thousands of our customers who faced disruption yesterday and today, and we’re very sorry.
‘We’re doing everything we can to get them to where they need to be and ask them to remain patient while we work to find solutions for everyone.
‘Our phone lines are extremely busy, as are our chat lines, and we ask customers whose flights are cancelled, do not come to the airport.’
Mr Rolfe has been under fire from Wizz Air and Ryanair after the latest issue which saw some passengers trapped on planes on runways for hours.
Ryanair called on the Government to ask Mr Rolfe to resign.
Asked in an interview with Times Radio Breakfast whether it was time for the Government to ‘step in’, the airline’s chief operations officer Neal McMahon said: ‘Absolutely.
‘We think (Ms Alexander) should ask him to resign.
‘We think it’s critical that we put in somebody in NATS at the top who can deliver resilience, who can deliver the extra staffing that’s needed so that NATS can perform as well as other ATC (air traffic control) providers across Europe.
‘Like, we don’t see this in France, we don’t see this in Italy, we don’t see this in Spain, we don’t see this in Ireland, we don’t see this in Germany.
‘This is a UK problem where the backup systems don’t kick in when the primary systems have a fault.’
He added that Ryanair has been forced to cancel 250 flights with costs to the company expected to ‘run into the millions’.
Mr McMahon said: ‘Airlines across the UK cancelled over a thousand flights, and hundreds of thousands of people were disrupted because the lessons learned for the previous failures have not been delivered by Martin Rolfe.’
Asked what he thought the cost to Ryanair would be following the incident, Mr McMahon said: ‘It’ll run into the millions.’
He added: ‘We have crews everywhere and it’s a real shambles because we couldn’t get our aircraft where they were meant to be yesterday.
‘We had 250 flights cancelled, so really, really disruptive for us.’
Mr McMahon also said yesterday’s NATS incident was caused by the ‘exactly the same issue’ as a problem in 2023.
In August 2023, more than 700,000 passengers experienced disruption when flights were grounded at UK airports when NATS suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.
Mr McMahon said of yesterday’s problem: ‘NATS told us it was a flight planning processing failure, which is exactly the same issue that happened in 2023.
‘If you remember in 2023 there was an issue with a flight plan, and it sent the system in a in a loop that eventually caused it to shut down.
‘We’re told that that was a rogue flight plan and we’re told yesterday this was a spurious flight plan which caused the same outage and our question is like: these things can happen, but where’s the backup systems?’
He added: ‘The failing is that the backup system was unable to kick in and work, like it’s not a backup system if it shuts down.
‘That’s the definition of a backup is that when the primary system goes down, that you can revert and keep going.’
Last July, a ‘radar-related issue’ caused an ATC failure that grounded flights across the UK, disrupting thousands of passengers and forcing the cancellation of more than 160 flights.
The problem happened at the NATS control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire, and affected the vast majority of England and Wales.
The managing director of Wizz Air UK said there are ‘serious questions about the resilience’ of the UK’s ATC service.
Yvonne Moynihan told the BBC: ‘We had 24 cancellations yesterday and over 21 other flights that were disrupted with long-term delays.
‘So that’s over 10,000 passengers coming in and out of London have had major disruption.’
Passengers sleep on the floor at Gatwick’s South Terminal this morning
An easyJet plane takes off from Gatwick this morning as some flights resume
Passengers rest with their luggage at Gatwick’s North Terminal today
Ms Moynihan added: ‘This is now the third time that we have had an air traffic control failure, and during the peak period as well. So major questions need to be asked There are serious questions about the resilience of this system.’
Asked whether Mr Rolfe should consider resigning, Ms Moynihan said: ‘I think in any industry, when you’ve had three failures, you need to consider that three strikes and you’re out. So I think it’s certainly something that he needs to look at.’
She added: ‘A third time and a third excuse is not enough anymore.’
Earlier, Mr Rolfe said that he ‘always accept(s) full responsibility’ when asked if he was considering his position after the incident.
He told Sky News: ‘I am the CEO of a piece of critical infrastructure, so it is my job to take responsibility for that.
‘What I absolutely take responsibility for is keeping people safe and delivering the best service we possibly can on a day like today.
‘You will understand my focus is entirely about how we actually resolve this issue, get things back to normal, help our airlines, our airport customers and the travelling public.’
This morning, Heathrow advised travellers to check their flight status before heading to the airport.
‘Following yesterday’s NATS technical issue, flights are operating today, but some disruption may continue as airlines reposition aircraft and crew,’ it said in a statement on social media.
‘Please check your flight status with your airline before travelling to the airport and only travel if your flight is confirmed to be operating.
‘We apologise to those affected and have extra colleagues across our terminals to support passengers while we work with NATS and airline partners to restore normal operations as quickly as possible.’
Gatwick also said flights had resumed but disruption was likely to continue.
Its statement said: ‘We still anticipate that it will take time for our operations to fully return to normal. Passengers should continue to check with their airlines for more information regarding their flights.’
Luton Airport confirmed early this morning that the airport was ‘open and operational’, but said: ‘Some flights may still be subject to disruption and passengers are advised to check their flight status directly before travelling to the airport.’
Travel journalist Simon Calder said the knock-on effects today were ‘going to be horrible’.
He told Sky News: ‘There are going to be dozens of cancellations in the morning of flights coming into Heathrow because, basically, the flights didn’t go out tonight.’
Air travel expert Julian Bray also said: ‘The disruption to air traffic is likely to go on for a good three weeks.
‘It was not just passenger services hit by the NATS Air Traffic computer meltdown but also crews and aircraft rendered inoperative as planes out of position, pilots out of hours as are cabin crew.
Join the discussion
Have you been caught up in the latest flight chaos?
Passengers wait at Heathrow today during ongoing disruption after a system issue hit NATS
People arrive with their luggage at Gatwick’s North Terminal this morning
Travellers wait at Heathrow today during ongoing disruption after a system issue hit NATS
‘Air cargo services also hit and many time critical shipments either ruined destroyed or delayed. Sadly all this could happen again with the current legacy computer set up it’s insufficient to simply bolt on new front end parts onto an ancient legacy system.’
Among the thousands facing disruption yesterday was Josie Donoghue, who had to get off her flight to Ireland after spending three hours on the runway at Gatwick.
Ms Donoghue said: ‘Getting through that airport was like trying to get out of Alcatraz. We were trapped in there. We were told we couldn’t get out until the flights were cancelled, and then eventually they allowed us to get out.
‘It’s just an absolute nightmare down there, it’s the only word I can use to describe it.’
Tory transport spokesman Greg Smith also criticised NATS, which is 49 per cent Government-owned.
He said: ‘Yet again passengers are stuck on the tarmac wondering why Britain cannot keep its own skies open. The Government and NATS must explain what has happened and how they will make sure resilience is improved.’
Luton Airport confirmed early today that it was ‘open and operational’, but warned that some flights could still be affected.
The airport said: ‘Some flights may still be subject to disruption and passengers are advised to check their flight status directly before travelling to the airport.’
Passengers have been urged to check directly with their airline before travelling to the airport and only set off if their flight is confirmed to be operating.
NATS said its operations are ‘stable’ in a statement this afternoon.
The air traffic control provider said: ‘Our operations are stable and we continue to work closely with airlines and airports to support their recovery from the ongoing disruption to their operations.
‘We would also like to reiterate our apology to all those affected – passengers, airlines and airports – by our system issue yesterday.
‘While our immediate focus is on safely managing today’s flights, a full investigation will be conducted to establish what happened and identify any further action needed.’
Ann O’Leary, director of donor and transplantation services at Anthony Nolan, said: ‘Flight cancellations are affecting more than holidaymakers; they’re also disrupting the delivery of lifesaving stem cells to patients in need.
‘Operational teams at the charity Anthony Nolan have been working closely with its stem cell couriers throughout the night to tackle obstacles but at least five couriers transporting stem cells for transplants were caught up in travel disruption caused by air traffic control issues.
‘Stem cells must be transported from donor to patient within a 72-hour window, meaning couriers have been forced to find alternative routes. One is travelling from Poland to Belgium, then taking the Eurostar to London before continuing by train to the transplant centre.’
Beverley Griffiths, a senior lecturer in security and resilience at Buckinghamshire New University, called on lessons to be learned from the incident.
She said: ‘The confirmation that a cyber attack has been ruled out is an important development, but the incident still highlights the vulnerability of highly complex and interconnected systems.
‘The focus now should be on understanding not only what technical problem occurred, but why it was able to cause such widespread disruption, and whether there are lessons around system resilience, redundancy, maintenance and contingency planning.
‘Air traffic management is a hugely complex system involving multiple technologies, organisations and suppliers, so failures can have consequences far beyond the original problem. From a resilience perspective, the key issue is not whether systems ever fail, but how effectively they respond and recover when they do.
‘For passengers, the disruption is understandably incredibly frustrating, particularly when journeys involve family commitments, business travel or international connections.
‘The real test of resilience will be how quickly services can be safely restored, how effectively those affected are supported, and what can be learned to reduce the impact of future incidents.’
Have you been affected? Please email: lettice.bromovsky@dailymail.co.uk
