Wizz Air, Ryanair call for NATS overhaul after UK flight disruption

LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters) - European budget carriers Wizz Air and Ryanair called on Tuesday for an overhaul of Britain's air traffic control provider NATS following a new technical issue that disrupted hundreds of flights at key airports in the country.

"A critical national infrastructure provider should not repeatedly bring the aviation system to a standstill. NATS is simply not fit for purpose in its current form," a spokesperson for Wizz Air said.

Rival Ryanair also criticised the agency and called for the resignation of its CEO, Martin Rolfe.

"Following the 2023 collapse, we were told lessons would be learned. We were told 'resilience would improve'. We were told the systems had been fixed. Yet here we are again," Ryanair Chief Operations Officer Neal McMahon said.

NATS said it had implemented a fix to the latest issue and was working with airlines and airports to get things back to normal.

"We are continuing to work closely with our airline and airport customers on recovery. We apologise sincerely for the disruption to people's journeys today and they should continue to check with their airline," a spokesperson said in a statement.    

In 2024, Britain's aviation regulator said NATS needed to review its contingency plans for outages after the automatic processing of flight plans malfunctioned a year earlier, causing chaos across Britain's airports.

The Civil Aviation Authority said on Tuesday it had been in touch with NATS over the incident and expects the latter to share a full report.

"We will then consider whether any further steps need to be taken to help secure the safe reliability of the UK's air traffic control system," a CAA spokesperson said.

(Reporting by Pushkala AripakaEditing by Tomasz Janowski and Nia Williams)