DUBLIN- The Irish Independent has learned that Ryanair (FR) is suing the UK’s air traffic control operator NATS over a computer meltdown last year, causing flight chaos and leaving thousands of passengers stranded abroad for days.
The legal action against NATS (En Route) Plc has been filed by Ryanair, led by group chief executive Michael O’Leary. Ryanair’s Irish and UK divisions have taken the lawsuit to the UK’s High Court. The case in the UK’s Commercial Court is being pursued in relation to “general commercial contracts and arrangements.”
Last year, on August 28, the NATS flight planning system crashed, causing flight cancellations and disrupting more than 700,000 passengers. An interim report published last month found that the malfunction resulted in “considerable financial and emotional consequences” for affected passengers.
Ryanair called for NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign last month and insisted that NATS should reimburse airlines and passengers for the costs they incurred due to the system collapse.
Airlines intending to operate flights through controlled airspace are required to file a flight plan containing information such as aircraft type, speed, and routing.
Last year’s NATS failure occurred when a system that processes flight plans was unable to properly process data for a specific flight from Los Angeles to Paris Orly.
The flight data processing led to errors being generated in the system, causing the software to put the system into maintenance mode to prevent transferring what it believed was corrupt flight data to air traffic controllers. At that point, further automated processing of flight plan data was impossible and had to be done manually.
350+ Flights Affected
The malfunction disrupted flight schedules. Ryanair was forced to cancel 350 flights between August 28 and 29, inconveniencing 63,000 of its passengers.
NATS is a public-private partnership, with both British Airways and EasyJet having a stake in the venture.
EasyJet (U2) had to cancel 511 flights on Monday, August 28, a bank holiday in the UK, which accounted for 27% of its scheduled flights that day. The following day, it had to cancel 88 flights. The NATS meltdown resulted in EasyJet incurring almost 65,000 minutes of delays, affecting 110,000 of its customers.
Sophie Dekkers, the chief commercial officer of EasyJet, informed the UK’s Transport Select Committee that the airline was “deeply concerned about the complete lack of communication between NATS and the airlines in those critical hours after the incident occurred.”
A total of more than 100 flights in and out of Ireland were canceled due to the problem.
Paying £100m in ATC Fees
An interim independent review of the system failure published last month pointed out delays in engineers addressing the issue, as they were on standby at home due to the bank holiday.
A reset of the failed system had to be done on-site. It took an engineer 90 minutes to arrive there, having exhausted other remediation attempts remotely.
Mr. O’Leary stated last month that Ryanair pays more than £100m (€116m) a year in air traffic control fees in the UK.
“We are entitled to expect an efficient, well-run service, rather than [the] mismanagement and incompetence we suffered on August 28, 2023, due to the NATS system collapse,” he said.
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