Nats air traffic control: August bank holiday flight meltdown caused by engineers 'sat at home' working 'in their pyjamas'

A review of the August bank holiday air traffic control (ATC) meltdown last year has found that it was caused by a “significant lack of pre-planning” and engineers being allowed to work from home. Nearly 750,000 passengers were disrupted when flights were grounded at UK airports on 28 August last year after ATC provider National Air Traffic Services (Nats) suffered a technical glitch while processing a flight plan.

An interim report from an inquiry found there does not appear to have been “any multi-agency rehearsal of the management of an incident of this nature and scale”. The inquiry found that Nats’ rostering of engineers is based “primarily” on the amount of work planned. So on public holidays when maintenance is not routinely scheduled it is “common practice for staff to be available on standby at remote locations – typically at home”.

On the day of the ATC failure, it took 90 minutes for the Level 2 on-call engineer to “arrive on-site in order to perform the necessary full system restart which was not permitted remotely”, the report said. It added that the assistance of a more senior engineer was not sought “for more than three hours after the initial failure”.

The interim report, published by regulator the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), said: “It is clear there is a significant lack of pre-planning and co-ordination for major events and incidents that targets the alleviation and remediation of major incidents.”

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “It was a completely unacceptable situation for passengers to face the scale of disruption that they did. We are clear that air traffic services must learn the lessons and ensure that this never happens again, so we welcome this interim report. We will allow the Civil Aviation Authority to publish its final report and the government will work with the industry and airlines to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said: “The CAA report confirms unbelievably that Nats engineers were sitting at home in their pyjamas on the UK’s August bank holiday weekend, which is one of the busiest travel weekends of the year for air travel. In any properly managed ATC service, engineers would be onsite to cover system breakdowns instead of sitting at home unable to log into the system.”

He went on to Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe saying he is “overpaid” and his position is “untenable”. Mr O’Leary said: “He should be removed, and somebody competent employed to run UK ATC, to ensure its engineers are at work during busy weekends and to ensure that UK Nats has a management team delivering a functional ATC system with adequate pre-planning, documentation and coordination.”

Nats said in a statement it followed “engineering protocols” on 28 August and there were “engineers both on site and on call”. It added: “The Level 2 on-call engineers are individual system experts and able to start working immediately when issues arise. They were not able to fix the issue remotely in this case.”

The inquiry was set up by the CAA and is being led by Jeff Halliwell, who has served as a chief executive and non-executive director in roles across the private and public sector. A spokesman for Nats said it “co-operated fully” with the review and will “continue to respond constructively to any further requests to support the panel’s ongoing work”.