Britain’s airlines are demanding that National Air Traffic Services (NATS) pay them back for the multi-million-pound cost of this month’s air traffic control failure, the third such breakdown in three years.
Industry body Airlines UK said its members were writing to NATS to “demand immediate compensation for the costs incurred”, along with a credible plan to improve resilience. The move follows the publication of NATS’s preliminary report into the September 8 outage.
That report found that a previously unknown software defect corrupted flight data within a millisecond, triggering a six-hour outage. The backlog took more than two days to clear, and more than 2,000 flights were eventually cancelled. Around 330,000 passengers were left stranded.
“Tens of millions” in costs
Airlines UK chief executive Tim Alderslade had already written to Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander in the days after the failure, warning that the financial fallout would run into tens of millions of pounds and fall entirely on airlines. The group asked the government and the Civil Aviation Authority to set out how the glitch would be investigated, require NATS to publish an improvement plan, and review the liability framework so carriers are not saddled with the costs. Its members include British Airways, easyJet, Ryanair and Virgin Atlantic.
The costs stem from UK passenger rights rules. The CAA said travellers would generally not be entitled to compensation because the disruption was likely to count as an “extraordinary circumstance”. Airlines must nonetheless provide refunds or rebooking, plus meals, accommodation and reasonable expenses for stranded passengers. Alderslade said this exposed a gap in regulation, with carriers expected to absorb costs even when the cause lies entirely outside their control.
Individual carriers have counted the damage. Ryanair put its losses at £3 million so far after cancelling 260 flights affecting 48,000 passengers, while British Airways cancelled 190 flights on the Wednesday alone. EasyJet chief executive Kenton Jarvis called for firm action and a fair solution so that airlines are not left to pick up the bill.
Third failure in three years
The latest failure revives memories of August 2023, when flight plan processing malfunctioned and some 700,000 passengers were affected; airline bosses said that outage cost them more than £100 million in refunds and compensation. NATS says the September 2026 fault involved a different component from the 2023 failure, a distinction Ryanair disputes.
The CAA will carry out an independent six-month review into the root causes and the system’s resilience. Airlines UK has also argued that the Civil Aviation Bill should address accountability for such failures.
