The airline slammed CEO Martin Rolfe’s “incompetence” saying that the Nats needed an “urgent reform”.
They also claimed that “no lessons have been learnt” since the August 2020 system outage.
*cough* Martin Rolfe @NATS *cough* https://t.co/DjzQ1Qwdbs
— Ryanair (@Ryanair) July 30, 2025
It follows a “technical issue” at the air traffic control centre earlier today, with all flights from the UK affected, impacting hundreds of passengers.
Ryanair’s chief operating officer Neal McMahon said: “It is outrageous that passengers are once again being hit with delays and disruption due to Martin Rolfe’s continued mismanagement of Nats.
“Yet another ATC system failure has resulted in the closure of UK airspace meaning thousands of passengers’ travel plans have been disrupted.
“It is clear that no lessons have been learnt since the Aug 2023 Nats system outage, and passengers continue to suffer as a result of Martin Rolfe’s incompetence.
“If Nats CEO Martin Rolfe fails to resign on the back of this latest Nats system outage that has disrupted thousands of passengers yet again, then UK transport minister Heidi Alexander must act without delay to remove Martin Rolfe and deliver urgent reform of Nats’ shambolic ATC service, so that airlines and passengers are no longer forced to endure these preventable delays caused by persistent Nats failures.”
Nats confirmed that its system is now “restored” and that they are in the “process of resuming normal operations”.
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Nats said: “We continue to work closely with airline and airport customers to minimise disruption. We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.”
Publishing its review of the 2023 outage that affected 700,000 passengers, the UK Civil Aviation Authority said in November last year that Nats should “review its contingency and engineering resource management arrangements”.
It also added that airlines and airports should “review the adequacy of the support available to passengers during significant disruption, in particular to vulnerable passengers and those travelling with children, and to develop a standardised suite of passenger information during major incidents.”
