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

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

Willie Walsh, the pinnacle 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 site visitors.

It comes after a whole bunch of flights have been cancelled – and 1000’s of passengers left stranded – after a pc glitch on Bank Holiday Monday brought on chaos at airports within the UK and overseas, with disruption anticipated to proceed all through the week.

NATS chief govt Martin Rolfe mentioned “unreliable” flight knowledge brought on the disruption, though a full investigation into what went mistaken is beneath method.

In a press release launched on Tuesday, Mr Rolfe mentioned: “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 previous chief govt of British Airways proprietor IAG, mentioned carriers have been dealing with 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 brought on the issue and mentioned questions wanted to be requested concerning the resilience of air site visitors management laptop techniques.

He mentioned: “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.”

Read extra:
What occurred and the way a repeat might be averted
Why you are not allowed off the airplane in case your flight is delayed
Am I entitled to compensation after air site visitors management chaos?

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.”

He is the most recent air trade determine to talk out after Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary blasted the chaos as “not acceptable”. Mr O’Leary mentioned 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 personal partnership part-owned by carriers – has insisted its employees had been working laborious 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 happy that we must always have faith in NATS going ahead”.

He added: “It’s a surprising efficiency from NATS, it has led to large 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 quite a lot of questions that must be answered.”