Ryanair has called for the resignation of NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe, following an incident in which a number of passengers travelling to and from London Stansted Airport faced delays of up to 2 hours due to NATS ATC staff shortages.
Separate calls for Rolfe’s resignation were made on a number of Ryanair’s social media channels, as well as its own website.
A statement on the Ryanair blog reads:It is completely unacceptable that passengers – many of whom are families heading away for the half-term break – are suffering unnecessary delays (up to 2hrs) due to NATS failure to provide adequate staff levels to manage traffic in/out of Stansted Airport on one of the busiest weekends of the year for travel.
Saturday’s disruptions further demonstrate that overpaid NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe, is not up to the job and should step aside and let someone competent take over.
This call is not the first time the airline has decried the NATS CEO. In March 2024, the airline called for Rolfe to step down or be replaced following a report showing alleged inadequacy in pre-planning, back up planning and engineer scheduling during the August 2023 bank holiday weekend, which saw a total collapse of NATS systems.
Speaking of the 2023 bank holiday difficulties, Ryanair CEO, Michael O’Leary, said in March 2024:Over the last 5 years, UK ATC have delivered repeated staff shortages and system breakdowns. The most serious of which was last year’s 28 Aug UK ATC collapse, which the CAA have now confirmed disrupted the travel plans of over 700,000 passengers.
Martin Rolfe and NATS produced a Whitewash Report, which misled Parliament as to the causes and effects of this latest NATS failure. Having delivered repeated ATC failures, Martin Rolfe will now deliver the comedy slot at the Airspace World 2024 Conference next Tues, where he will entertain all attendees with his views on 'Crisis Management in ATM: Ensuring Business Continuity'. Sadly no one knows less about business continuity than Martin Rolfe.
This could be one of the shortest presentations in conference history given that he specialises in creating crises rather than solving them. We look forward to hearing how Matin Rolfe’s engineers were sitting at home in their pyjamas during last year’s Aug bank holiday, one of the busiest travel weekends of the year, and then when NATS systems collapsed, they couldn’t even log into their own computers.
Martin Rolfe first joined NATS as Managing Director of Operations in 2012, before being named CEO in May 2015. In May 2024, Rolfe was appointed as Non-Executive Board Director at the Port of London Authority, effective from June of the same year.
