Proactive Investors - easyJet (LON:EZJ) and Ryanair (LON:0RYA) have asked questions of Britain’s air traffic control systems after an hours-long failure last week sent the industry into chaos.
Airlines have effectively been left in the dark following the failure, which affected around 300,000 people and caused the cancellations of several thousand flights, the budget duo said.
“An incident of this scale should not have happened and must not happen again in the future,” easyJet boss Johan Lundgren commented.
Ryanair said the failure “has still not been explained” meanwhile, as the Irish carrier revealed some 63,000 of its passengers were affected and 350 flights cancelled as a result.
According to National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the issue saw its entire system go into shutdown on Monday for several hours due to some incorrect incoming data.
This left air traffic controllers having to manually input flight data, leading to a restriction being placed on the number of in and outgoing UK flights that could be handled.
Lundgren argued that “passengers deserve to see a full independent review” of the event, with this already promised to regulator the Civil Aviation Authority by NATS last week.
“[This should] not only result in meaningful improvements to prevent an incident of this scale happening again but also consider a wide range of issues beyond this incident,” Lundgren said, “including staffing levels required at NATS’ to deliver today’s flying and what modernisation is needed".
Over a quarter of Britain’s flights are estimated to have been cancelled last Monday due to the fault, with thousands more delayed and issues continuing late into the week.
Most chaos-hit passengers had reached their final destinated come Saturday, according to transport secretary Mark Harper, with the review having been expected on Sunday.
How it happened?
NATS first publicly notified that it was experiencing an issue at 12:10 British summer time (BST) on Monday afternoon.
“We are currently experiencing a technical issue and have applied traffic flow restrictions to maintain safety. Engineers are working to find and fix the fault,” NATS reported initially.
Issues then continued into the afternoon, with another blog post at 12:40 BST reassuring that the air traffic controller was still working “hard to resolve the technical issue”.
“To clarify, UK airspace is not closed, we have had to apply air traffic flow restrictions which ensures we can maintain safety,” NATS then added.
An update at 14:20 then confirmed air traffic controllers had taken to manually imputing flight data, prompting the traffic restrictions given the more painstaking process.
In the proceeding hour, the likes of easyJet, Ryanair and British Airways (LON:ICAG) then warned of “severe” disruption due to the issue, acknowledging flights would have to be cancelled.
At 15:15 - just over three hours after the issue was first reported - NATS updated that the fault had been “identified and remedied”.
Though seemingly just hours long, the fault had already ensured disruption for thousands of flights and the hundreds of passengers due to travel on each.
Given its severity, the industry has since called for answers on how such an issue could happen and who should bear the costs, with this tipped by the International Air Transport Association to be much as £100 million for the airlines affected.