Ryanair Holdings PLC (LSE:RYA) boss Michael O’Leary has called on the head of UK air traffic control to resign after the release of a report on last August’s chaotic system outage.
The interim report, released by the Civil Aviation Authority on Thursday, found around 700,000 passengers were impacted as flights were grounded on the back of a fault in the air traffic control system (NATS).
There was a “significant lack of pre-planning” for such an incident, as per the regulator, with the likes of an on-call engineer taking 90 minutes to respond to the outage due to working from home.
“The CAA report confirms that NATS engineers were sitting at home in their pyjamas on the UK’s August bank holiday weekend,” Ryanir’s O’Leary said in response on Thursday.
“Overpaid NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe’s position is untenable,” he added. “If he won’t quit, then transport secretary Mark Harper [...] should remove him”.
Thousands of flights were impacted by the outage, which was caused by a glitch and lasted for several hours on August 28, forcing controllers to manually input flight data.
Airlines spent the best part of a week reeling from related delays and cancellations, as passengers faced being stranded overseas.
“UK airlines and passengers are paying NATS among the highest air traffic control fees in Europe,” O’Leary added.
“In Ryanair’s case, we pay over £100 million [a year] and we are entitled to expect an efficient well-run service, rather than mismanagement and incompetence we suffered on [...] due to the NATS system collapse.”