Airlines Confidential · Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Martin Rowlf, CEO of NATS, apologized for the air traffic control system outage but defended the system's fitness for purpose. This comes as it was revealed to be the third major incident caused by a NATS system failure in three years, leading to public frustration and questions about the system's resilience.
“Martin Rowlf, the CEO of NATS, was on BBC and was apologizing for the outage for sure, but when asked, you know, are your systems really fit for purpose? He was like, yeah, yeah, they're fit for purpose.”
“And basically people are just scratching their head. You know, so what it's come out to be is that a military aircraft submitted a flight plan into the flight planning system that had some, some maybe some additional characters, some spurious information. We don't know exactly what. And it brought down the entire UK air traffic control system.”
“And the question is like, all right, how can that one flight plan bring down the whole system, you know? Seriously. And there's a sense that there isn't a backup, there isn't, you know, some sort of business continuity or disaster recovery. And it's just a really bad situation.”