Willie Walsh: Boss of airways group says air visitors management agency NATS ought to pay for ‘surprising’ airport chaos

The boss of airline business physique IATA has blasted National Air Traffic Services (NATS) for the latest chaos at Britain’s airports – and demanded the corporate foots the invoice for the disruption.

Willie Walsh, the top of the International Air Transport Association, which represents greater than 300 of the world’s carriers, additionally questioned whether or not the agency ought to proceed to carry duty for dealing with the UK’s flight visitors.

It comes after hundreds of flights were cancelled – and thousands of passengers left stranded – after a pc glitch on Bank Holiday Monday induced chaos at airports within the UK and overseas, with disruption anticipated to proceed all through the week.

NATS chief government Martin Rolfe stated “unreliable” flight data caused the disruption, though a full investigation into what went mistaken is below manner.

In a press release launched on Tuesday, Mr Rolfe stated: “I wish to apologise once more for our technical failure yesterday.

“While we resolved the problem quickly, I am very conscious that the knock-on effects at such a busy time of year are still being felt by many people travelling in and out of the UK.”

But Mr Walsh, the former chief executive of British Airways owner IAG, stated carriers have been going through a possible invoice of as much as £100m because of the failure.

In an interview with Sky News, he known as on NATS to obviously clarify what induced the issue and stated questions wanted to be requested concerning the resilience of air visitors management pc techniques.

He stated: “They [NATS] should be held to account and they should pay for the expenses that have occurred… airlines are a victim in this situation, they’re not the cause of the problem.”

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Mr Walsh added: “At the moment, I have to say, my confidence in NATS has been badly shaken and until we can evaluate the cause, and the actions taken by NATS to address this, we’re going to have doubts about whether they are the right party to continue to operate this system.”

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He is the newest air business determine to talk out after Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary blasted the chaos as “not acceptable”. Mr O’Leary stated his airline was compelled to cancel 250 flights on Monday and dozens extra on Tuesday.

The Civil Aviation Authority has pledged to hold out an investigation, whereas NATS – a public non-public partnership part-owned by carriers – has insisted its employees had been working onerous to make sure the fault by no means occurred once more.

But Mr Walsh instructed Sky News: “I’m surprised that Martin [Rolfe], the CEO at NATS, is so confident that the problem won’t reoccur.

“We do have to see much more element earlier than we might be glad that we should always have faith in NATS going ahead”.

He added: “It’s a surprising efficiency from NATS, it has led to huge disruption and clearly it is unacceptable that we get this degree of disruption at a peak time of the yr, – or certainly at any time of the yr – and I feel NATS have a number of questions that have to be answered.”