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Delayed passengers wait and queue with their luggage at Terminal 3 of London Heathrow airport, west of London on Tuesday. Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O'Leary on Thursday accused the head of Britain's air traffic control operator of lying about the cause of an outage that led to thousands of flight cancellations earlier this week, reports Reuters. O'Leary said Ryanair had been told by NATS that the outage was caused by a rogue flight plan, the same problem that caused a major disruption in 2023. Speaking on BBC Radio on Wednesday, NATS CEO Martin Rolfe said he believed the latest outage had been caused by "something different" from previous incidents. O'Leary, who has repeatedly called for Rolfe to resign, rejected that explanation. "NATS have told us it was another rogue flight plan. Now Martin Rolfe is out denying it Thursday," O'Leary said. "I believe he's telling lies to save his own skin." A NATS investigation into the 2023 outage found it was caused by a "one in 15mn" event in which a flight plan contained two identically named but separate waypoints, forcing both the system and its back-up into a "fail-safe" mode. Responding to a similar statement from O'Leary on Wednesday, NATS said the latest outage had been caused by a different issue. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment on O'Leary's latest remarks. Ryanair is suing NATS in London's High Court for more than £7mn ($9.5mn) over the 2023 outage and has called on the operator to reinvest profits in performance improvements and staffing. The government has given Rolfe a week to investigate the cause of the latest systems failure. Transport minister Heidi Alexander, who summoned Rolfe for a meeting over the incident, said on Wednesday she believed the outage was avoidable and asked the Civil Aviation Authority to conduct an independent review. 

Britain’s air traffic control system failed again on Tuesday afternoon. NATS announced at 13:46 that it was investigating a technical issue in its flight-processing system, and departures across the country were restricted almost immediately. Engineers had a fix in place by roughly 16:40. The airspace was fine again by early evening. The airline schedules were finished.That gap explains why the industry reacted the way it did. Four hours of degraded capacity produced several days of recovery. Aircraft were in the wrong places. Crews were out of hours. FlightAware counted around 490 delayed departures at six airports by mid-afternoon and 525 arrivals cancelled or delayed at the same airports. Flightradar24 logged at least 625 cancellations nationwide. Ryanair put 65,000 of its own passengers into the disruption column and pulled 50 flights. British Airways cancelled or diverted more than a hundred. Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Belfast City, Southampton, East Midlands, Jersey; Dublin services were caught too, because UK-controlled airspace does not stop at the coast.Heathrow spent the evening telling passengers to check with their airline before travelling, which is the institutional way of saying nobody knows yet.Here’s the part that concerns much of the rest of the industry, and the public. In December 2013, the internal telephony system at Swanwick failed and forced flow restrictions across southern England. December 2014: A software fault in the flight data system at the same centre shut London airspace and drew a parliamentary inquiry. December 2019, another technical fault, more disrupted departures.Then August 2023, which is the one everybody remembers. A flight-plan processing failure that disrupted thousands of flights and cost airlines north of £100mn in refunds and compensation. More than 700,000 passengers affected. The CAA commissioned an independent review, which produced 34 recommendations on resilience.On 30 July 2025 a radar-related fault at Swanwick cancelled over 150 flights and constrained UK airspace for more than four hours. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander summoned NATS boss Martin Rolfe to explain himself. Ryanair called for his resignation, as it had before. The transport secretary described the incident as isolated.Now the detail worth dwelling on. The CAA closed the last of those 34 recommendations on 19 June 2026. Eleven weeks later, the flight-processing system went down again.A remediation programme ran for nearly three years, was signed off as complete, and the same category of failure returned before the ink was dry. Call that bad luck once; twice starts to look like a diagnosis.Airlines are no longer diplomatic about NATS failures. Wizz Air and Ryanair agree on very little. They found each other within hours on Tuesday. Wizz said a critical national infrastructure provider should not repeatedly bring the aviation system to a standstill, and described NATS as “simply not fit for purpose in its current form”. Ryanair aimed at the man. Neal McMahon, the airline’s chief operating officer, walked through the sequence: the 2023 collapse, the promised lessons, the promised resilience, the promised fixes. “Yet here we are again,” he said. The airline wants Rolfe gone.Michael O’Leary has been making this argument for three years in language that swings between forensic and explosive. The commercial point, through, is this: airlines pay for a failure they did not cause and cannot insure against.Look at how the regulation lands. An ATC fault sits outside the airline’s control, so the cancellations qualify as extraordinary circumstances under UK261. Passengers keep rerouting and duty of care. The fixed compensation disappears. The carrier still funds the hotel rooms, the meals, the rebookings, the positioning flights, the lost sectors, the crews timing out in the wrong city. NATS funds none of it.Redesign that and the resilience debate changes overnight. Nobody in Whitehall seems eager to try.Heathrow is already load-bearing for every Gulf carrier. High-frequency, high-yield UK access feeding onward traffic into Asia, Africa and Australasia is the spine of the business model, and a four-hour London restriction strands widebodies and crews thousands of miles from where tomorrow’s schedule needs them. Long-haul recovery is slow and expensive. Aircraft cycle back into position over days. The missed connections sit disproportionately at the front of the cabin, which is where the money is.There is a philosophical divergence here that goes under-discussed. Gulf states have spent twenty years building airspace, terminal and systems capacity ahead of demand, on the understanding that aviation infrastructure is a sovereign strategic asset. Britain has spent the same twenty years squeezing an ageing estate through a regulated price control that treats resilience spending as a cost line to be justified. Anyone looking at Tuesday can flag the architectural weakness underneath all of it: primary and backup systems running the same logic, so one software flaw takes down both. That gives you the shape of redundancy with none of the protection.The CAA has asked NATS for a full report and will decide afterwards whether further action is needed. Same procedure as 2023. Same procedure as 2025.Most of this week’s coverage will be about whether Rolfe survives. It is also the least consequential question in the file. Replacing the chief executive achieves nothing when every line of code at Swanwick stays exactly where it is.What would move the needle is duller and harder. Outage frequency and recovery time given real financial weight inside the price control. Independently verified architectural diversity between primary and contingency systems, so they cannot fail from the same cause. Some share of airline recovery costs landing on the monopoly that caused them.Britain is preparing to expand Heathrow and attempt grow an aviation economy sits on top of this foundation. Three failures in three years, three investigations, three sets of assurances. The foundation needs fixing first.The author is an aviation analyst. X handle: @AlexInAir

A deeply embarrassing systems failure which forced Greece to close its airspace for several hours with pilots unable to speak to air traffic control, has exposed badly outdated communication systems at Athens International Airport - one of the world's top travel destinations.Flights had to be diverted to neighbouring countries with thousands of travellers hit after the "unprecedented" technical malfunction on January 4, which baffled experts.Even more than a week after the chaos, questions as to what sparked the glitch - and how the system returned online - remain unanswered, with a report expected this week.According to the Greek civil aviation authority, the YPA, the malfunction began at 8:59am (0659 GMT) when multiple radio frequencies serving Athens airspace were hit by continuous "noise" interference.The agency's transmitters began sending out "involuntary signal emissions", YPA said.As technicians raced to radio relay stations on top of mountains near Athens and further afield to locate the problem, planes were essentially flying blind, experts said - unable to communicate with air traffic controllers - until the incident began to gradually abate four hours later."Hundreds of flights were directly affected - those in contact with air traffic control or already in the air that changed their route," Foivos Kaperonis, a board member of the Greek air traffic controllers association (EEEK), told AFP.Athens International Airport handled over 280,000 flights last year, an average of over 760 a day.Officials have insisted that Athens airspace was quickly cleared of traffic, and that flight safety was not compromised.The system returned to full operation at 5pm (1500 GMT), with flights restored 45 minutes later, the YPA said.No signs of a cyberattack or intentional sabotage were detected, YPA said. And nothing suspicious was found at the relay stations.Government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis later confirmed there was "no sign" of a cyberattack."We have an exact picture of what happened. What we don't yet know is how it happened," Michael Bletsas, one of Greece's top computer engineers and head of the Greek cybersecurity authority, told state TV ERT.Planes "may have flown 'deaf' for a short while... but under no circumstances was there a flight safety problem," he said, with pilots still having their radar."Every system fails at some point," said Bletsas, who is on the committee investigating the incident.Kaperonis is much less sanguine."Air traffic controllers could see the aircraft on the radar display, but they could neither hear the pilots nor speak to them," he said."In other words, if two aircraft had been on a collision course, controllers would not have been able to give them instructions," he said.George Saounatsos, the head of the YPA, said a report on the incident by a hurriedly-convened investigative committee would likely be delivered this week."It was a rare event - it's hard for this to happen again, even statistically," he told Open TV.A major infrastructure overhaul costing 300mn euros ($350mn) is currently underway, which includes digital transmitters that will be delivered this year, Saounatsos said.Greece's junior transport minister has admitted the airport's communications systems should have been upgraded "decades" earlier."These are systems we know are outdated," Konstantinos Kyranakis told Action24 TV.The Athens airport tower radar dates from 1999, air traffic controllers note."Clearly, systems that should have been replaced decades ago, cannot be replaced in nine months," Kyranakis said, who was appointed in March.Four different transport ministers have held the portfolio since 2019 when conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis came to power.Bertrand Vilmer, an aeronautics expert and consultant at Paris-based Icare Aeronautique, said Athens' largely analogue-based systems "are robust, but ones for which there's no longer really any possible maintenance because they're old."Last month the European Commission referred Greece to the EU Court of Justice for failing to put in place measures to design and publish performance-based navigation (PBN) procedures at Greek airports that should have been in place five years ago.Air traffic controllers, who have clashed with YPA for years over staff and infrastructure shortages, insist that the January 4 incident was a debacle waiting to happen.They say that the incident is particularly concerning in a country heavily reliant on tourism that has seen record visitor numbers in recent years."The air traffic control unit where the problem appeared handles up to nearly 5,000 flights per day during the summer season," Kaperonis said.Air traffic controllers require "long rest periods" due to the difficulty of their job, Vilmer said.YPA and the transport minister's office did not respond to questions.Athens International Airport last year handled nearly 34mn passengers, an increase of 6.7% over the previous year.Critics have also noted that Greece's worst rail disaster, when two trains collided in 2023, killing 57 people - which brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets to protest - was also partly caused by chronic infrastructure and staffing failings. 

For a few tense hours on Sunday ‌morning, Greek skies turned into a communications black hole. Air traffic controllers for ‌Athens airport were guiding planes towards ‍the runway when the usual radio chatter suddenly vanished - replaced by a piercing whistle.It quickly became clear that ⁠controllers had lost contact with most aircraft in ⁠Greek airspace, including dozens of incoming flights, according to two controllers and an aviation official on ‍duty at the time.Internet systems also appeared to fail across the board. Even the civil aviation authority's press office resorted to reading statements over the phone rather than sending by email.The outage, which lasted several hours and affected most of Greece's airports, stranded thousands of travellers. Authorities have ruled out a cyberattack, but the cause remains unknown - and officials admit the systems didn't get fixed, they simply came back on their own."Suddenly communications ‌went down. You could only hear a high-pitched whistle," said one controller, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The thing is, we don't know what caused it and how it ended. We want to find out ‍the exact cause to ensure once ⁠and for all that ‌this will not happen again."Controllers managed to identify a couple of working radio frequencies in the tower, but not enough to maintain safe communication with pilots, a senior official said. Within half an hour, Greece took the unprecedented step of suspending flights into and across its airspace.Air traffic controllers from across the region stepped in to help. A controller in a neighbouring country said most communication with Greece was done over the telephone because the usual radios were down."We had a black hole in Greek airspace," said aviation safety expert Faithon Karaiosifidis. "Imagine if it had happened in the summer at the peak of the tourist season. The chaos."The incident ​has reignited calls to upgrade Greece's aviation ‌infrastructure, which unions and experts say is outdated and underfunded after the country's 2009-2018 debt crisis.The government insisted on Monday that modernisation is underway ⁠and that current systems meet ‍EU standards. The plan, which includes updating communication systems, is due for completion in 2028.But last month, the European Commission referred Greece to the EU Court of Justice for failing to implement certain navigation procedures designed to boost safety in low-visibility conditions. It's unclear whether those measures would have made any difference on Sunday - but many worry reform is coming too late."This incident once again exposes ​the critical weaknesses of outdated and underfunded air traffic management infrastructure. Safety was maintained thanks to human expertise - but this cannot continue to compensate for systemic deficiencies," said Panagiotis Psarros, Chair of the Association of Greek Air Traffic Controllers.Experts say the problems go beyond ageing equipment. Radios dating back to the 1990s remain in use, and staffing shortages persist despite a tourism boom that brings millions of visitors to Greece each year."The old technical equipment and the lack of personnel in air traffic controllers and electronic technicians... create a bottleneck," said Karaiosifidis.In September, unions ⁠protested by limiting flight arrivals they said exceeded permitted limits, causing delays. They have now threatened to do the same again. 

US officials said the scheduled capacity for flights was being cut by 10% in 40 busy air traffic areas nationwide today, as the longest government shutdown drags on.Federal agencies have been grinding to a halt since Congress failed to approve funding past September 30, with some 1.4mn federal workers, from air traffic controllers to park wardens, still on enforced leave or working without pay."There is going to be a 10% reduction in capacity at 40 of our locations," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told a White House news briefing on Wednesday, adding they would come into effect on Friday.Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Bryan Bedford said the cuts would be at "40 high traffic environment markets."According to a proposed list provided to CBS News, some of the nation's busiest airports in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York City could be among those hit.AFP contacted the Department of Transport and FAA seeking details about which airports would be affected.The government shutdown became the longest in history on Wednesday, eclipsing the 35-day record set during President Donald Trump's first term.Airport workers calling in sick rather than working without pay — which led to significant delays — was a major factor in Trump bringing an end to that 2019 shutdown.More than 60,000 air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration officers are now working without pay, and the White House has warned that increased absenteeism could create chaos at check-in lines.House Speaker Mike Johnson said in late October that 5% of flight delays had been the result of staffing shortages but that number had now increased to more than 50%.He warned at the time that the "longer the shutdown goes on, and as fewer air traffic controllers show up to work, the safety of the American people is thrown further into jeopardy."However, Democrats and Republicans have both remained unwavering over the main sticking point in the shutdown: health care spending.Democrats say they will only provide votes to end the funding lapse after a deal has been struck to extend expiring insurance subsidies that make health care affordable for millions of Americans.But Republicans insist they will only address health care once Democrats have voted to switch the lights back on in Washington.Trump has sought to apply his own pressure to force Democrats to cave by threatening mass layoffs of federal workers and using the shutdown to target progressive priorities.He repeated on Tuesday his administration's threat to cut off a vital aid program that helps 42mn Americans pay for groceries for the first time in its more than 60-year history, even though the move was blocked by two courts.The White House later clarified that it was "fully complying" with its legal obligations and was working to get partial Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments "out the door as much as we can and as quickly as we can."

The shortage of air traffic controllers keeping watch over America’s skies prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to embark on a massive recruitment drive.Now, the FAA has another problem: There are not enough instructors to teach all those new recruits the ropes.Teachers at the FAA’s training academy in Oklahoma City, mostly retired former controllers in their 60s, are increasingly required to work from 7am to midnight, powering through with endless cups of coffee they pay for themselves.Although a new labour contract has boosted instructors’ pay and benefits somewhat — many work part time, earning about $46 an hour — their daily grind isn’t getting any easier as an influx of fresh recruits into the academy has put additional strain on teachers, according to shift schedules and emails obtained by Bloomberg News and interviews with eight current academy instructors who requested anonymity as they’re not authorised to speak to the media.July saw the highest number of academy students in the FAA’s history (550), and August and September could top that. Schedules obtained by Bloomberg News show a sharp rise in the number of double shifts required for instructors, most of whom who are employed by the federal contractor Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), not by the FAA. They teach aviation basics, complex air-traffic scenarios and other courses during the recruits’ two months of training.On March 6, for example, just six of the 105 instructors who teach one facet of the academy curriculum and were on duty that day had a double shift. A preliminary schedule for September 2, distributed in late August, showed 42 instructors from the same group assigned to doubles. (That figure could change slightly as schedules get finalised.) While some instructors request double shifts, in order to make as much money as possible in a short period of time, others refuse.“Due to the surge in hiring for the last 4-5 months of FY25, we will be averaging significantly higher student requirements,” Richard Klumpp, a program management senior director at SAIC, said in a July 30 email viewed by Bloomberg News. “We have way more work than we have instructor availability in September thru mid-December.”In the email, Klumpp also expressed his “concern” in having enough instructors “to help reduce the doubles load on the team.” That load results in some instructors “walking around like zombies,” according to one instructor. A spokesperson for SAIC declined to comment.Some of the instructors who spoke to Bloomberg News said they decline to work double shifts out of concern for their physical and mental health. (At least one teacher at the academy is well into his 80s.) Many of them said they don’t need the extra money, as they earned six-figure salaries before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 56 for air traffic controllers and are financially secure. They teach because they enjoy the job and the camaraderie among instructors, or simply to ward off boredom.“Most of the people who work choose to, it’s not because they have to,” said Andrew Hudson, a financial adviser who works almost exclusively with air traffic controllers. “These people just don’t want to sit around all day.”The FAA was short about 3,900 certified air traffic controllers at the close of its 2024 fiscal year in October, and has said it anticipates it will hire about 2,000 controllers this fiscal year after speeding up the hiring process and boosting salaries for trainees. It expects to hire at least 8,900 controllers through 2028, but admitted in a recent workforce report that “the number of instructors at the FAA Academy creates a practical limit” on the number of trainees that can move through the system.US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said he wants to plug the gaps in instructors amid the surge of trainees by using teaching assistants and other “expert educators” who aren’t former controllers. Those other instructors will begin work in a few months after getting hired and trained. The FAA has research showing they can perform the job just as well as former air traffic controllers, but declined to share it.Several longtime instructors, though, said those substitutes can’t provide the know-how that only comes from years of experience as a controller. Academy classes include basic tabletop exercises with model planes along with more technical instruction on the FAA’s air-traffic tracking and management system, known as ERAM. The FAA is also reviewing the academy curriculum, and could make changes that would reduce the number of instructors required for some courses.Some instructors have recently quit, others are considering doing so, and replenishing the ranks isn’t easy as there’s often little incentive for retired controllers to commute back and forth every few months from, say, Florida or New York, to Oklahoma City. Although instructors say they enjoy teaching the next generation of controllers, persuading former colleagues to ditch their grandkids and golf courses to join them can be a significant recruitment challenge.The previous collective bargaining agreement between SAIC and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), the union that represents 317 academy instructors, provided a $60 daily reimbursement for those who didn’t live in Oklahoma City. But that amount only went so far, leading many instructors to rent an apartment in Walnut Gardens, about a 30-minute drive to the FAA Academy.The new labour agreement raises the daily reimbursement to $90 in January and provides 3% wage increases annually over the three-year contract, which works out to an additional $1.40 or so per hour from the $46.73 per hour many instructors earn now. (Those who teach basic courses make less.) The IAM called it a “major step forward” but said “we still have some work to do to help us recruit and retain instructors while improving quality of life for a workforce that has carried a heavy load to meet the mission.”Instructors who work double shifts often don’t get to sleep until 1am, then might need to get back up around 5am to get to the academy during rush hour for a morning class, or another double shift. Many admitted that it’s impossible to give students their“The thing nobody knows about us is we’re all voluntary — we do not have to be here,” one instructor said. “I can quit today and I’m done.”