Airlines say they shouldn’t have to face the burden of paying compensation to passengers when flights are cancelled and disrupted because of strikes or flight disruptions.
“There has to be recourse for airlines … We can’t be the insurer of last resort for everything that goes wrong in our industry,” Loganair Chief Executive Jonathan Hinkles told MPs on the Transport select committee.
Senior airline officials said they were left paying out millions to customers whose flights were cancelled after a UK air traffic control problem in August resulted in thousands of flight cancellations and delays.
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary blasted the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) for the system collapse claiming it was a ‘byword for regulatory incompetence and mismanagement” and its chief executive Martin Rolfe sacked.
The boss of Ryanair claimed the August bank holiday air traffic chaos was the result of NATS “collapsing their system”.
“You lot (Nats) not just collapsed the main system, you collapsed your backup system, and all your engineers were sitting at home watching morning television instead of being where they’re supposed to be,” he said.
The chaos cost Ryanair £15m in meals, drinks and accommodation for passengers affected. EasyJet’s commercial chief Sophie Dekkers said its losses were similar to Ryanair.
Martin Rolfe told MPs the flight plan which led to the NATS system failure was “incredibly unusual” and “unlike any we’d seen before”.
“It was sufficiently unusual with not just duplicate waypoints, as you may have been informed earlier, but the combination of them, the sequence of them, and it was sufficiently different that the system decided the safest course of action was to stop processing and essentially allow a human to intervene.
“That’s the basis of our safety critical systems.” … We’re not focused on cost, we’re focused on safely fixing and restoring traffic,” Rolfe said.
