<div id="readability-page-1"><div><div><div><div><p>Britain’s air traffic control chief claims he was wrongly persecuted for his role in one of the country’s biggest flight delay disasters.</p><p>Martin Rolfe, who became public enemy number one for several days in the summer of 2023 after a crippling outage at National Air Traffic Services (Nats), says the invasion of his family’s privacy during the chaos was “entirely unacceptable”.</p><p>Rolfe, the chief executive of the air traffic control company, claims he was vilified on social media following the IT meltdown, which disrupted flights for 700,000 people over the August bank holiday weekend and cost airlines £65m.</p><p>The mass groundings sparked criticism over his £1.3m bonus. Photographers descended on Rolfe’s Hampshire home. More than two and a half years on, the hostile reaction to the 2023 outage still rankles.</p><p>Rolfe, 53, says that while the personalisation of the meltdown was inevitable, it was unacceptable for his family to get caught up in the storm.</p></div></div><div><div><p>“Society has become intolerant of anything failing,” he says. “It’s that sort of internet-age thing. It’s on Facebook in 10 seconds.</p><p>“Where you’re doing something which is of national interest, you know there is a reasonable chance it could happen. It doesn’t really matter if it’s fair.</p><p>“But do I think it’s reasonable that people come and take photographs of my house and my children? Of course not.</p><p>“I do a job and I think I do it reasonably well. And we were giving interviews. It wasn’t like I was refusing to speak.”</p><p>It was not just passengers who were attacking Rolfe during the crisis. At the time, an inquiry found that on-call staff had failed to respond to the incident, triggered after faulty data relating to a single flight caused the system to freeze.</p><p>It prompted Michael O’Leary, the boss of Ryanair, to label Rolfe incompetent and say he should resign.</p><p>The Irishman – who claimed Rolfe’s work-from-home policy allowed engineers to be “sat watching Football Focus in their jim-jams” – has since repeated the call on numerous occasions, with easyJet and British Airways adding to the criticism.</p><p>Rolfe says that while he accepts the blame for the meltdown, it should have been viewed in the context of Nats’s success in delivering “10 times better safety and 10 times better capacity and delay performance” since it was privatised in 2001.</p><p>He says: “I think we’ve had four incidents in 12 years, each of which has lasted less than a day.</p></div></div><div><div><p>“What would be good enough? Is it one incident in a hundred years? And if so, would you want to pay 10 times as much for your ticket? I think probably not.”</p><p>Rolfe says that “these things happen”, adding: “What we try to do is absolutely minimise them and then recover as quickly as possible. But [we] will always take the right action even if that means people not getting to their destination.</p><p>“Somebody once said to me, ‘you would far rather be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground’. I think that’s a pretty good mantra.”</p></div></div><div><div><p>As for the Ryanair supremo, Rolfe says their encounters have been few and far between.</p><p>“I saw him a few months ago,” he says. “We said ‘hi’ from a distance. We have a sort of professional relationship. I wouldn’t say we go out for a cup of tea or anything.</p><p>“If you’re running an airline and you’ve got passengers screaming at you and it’s not your fault you probably say, ‘look, it’s their fault over there’. I can’t really blame them for that.</p><p>“But I think the majority of airlines are pretty happy with our service. There is a camaraderie there, not everywhere but for the most part. One of the airline CEOs emailed saying, ‘feeling for you, if you want to have a chat anytime give me a shout’.”</p><p>Resignation, he says, was never an option: “If you are leading an organisation, you have to lead it through the hard stuff.”</p></div></div><div><div><p>Having ridden out the crisis – and survived a grilling from Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, over a smaller radar-related outage last July – Rolfe is poised to court controversy again as Nats embarks on a sweeping revamp of UK airspace.</p><p>The initiative will seek to modernise a system devised in the 1950s, when flights totalled 200,000 a year – less than a tenth of the number today.</p><p>While the remapping of flightpaths and runway approaches will help to accommodate hundreds of thousands more services from new runways at Heathrow and Gatwick, it will inevitably expose hitherto quiet areas to aircraft noise.</p><p>Rolfe says: “All the routes will be redesigned and you’re changing where you fly over the ground, which is one of the biggest reasons it has been so difficult to do over the years. But with the new runways it cannot be avoided.</p><p>“There have been some changes in the last 15 years but the majority have not been over the South East where you’ve got the biggest population and changing it is most challenging.”</p></div></div><div><div><p>More positively, he says, aircraft will be able to fly shorter routes: reducing flight times, easing the workload for pilots and cutting carbon emissions by 6pc.</p><p>Still, putting aircraft into holding patterns will remain necessary at busy airports such as Heathrow in order to guarantee evenly spaced landings, Rolfe says: “You want as few as possible but enough that you’ve got one landing every 90 seconds.”</p><p>A new blueprint for the skies over London, which will include so-called flying taxis slated for take-off in the next few years, should be ready by the end of the current parliament.</p><p>Rolfe, who will soon have been chief executive for 11 years, says he would like to see the process out.</p><p>Despite the advanced nature of the runway projects, the plan will hedge its bets, producing two designs: one with the extra landing strips and one without. The airspace changes will be introduced over five years through 2035 and should have a shelf life of at least 30 years.</p><p>Rolfe says he is pessimistic about prospects for the creation of a “single European sky” that would make flights more efficient across the region.</p><p>“A lot of it is around trying to remove borders, which has proved challenging on the basis that every country has a view of their own airspace. And given the current geopolitical situation, that’s becoming more of a consideration rather than less.”</p></div></div><div><div><p>He says individual control authorities are introducing reforms anyway, resulting in improved aircraft flows and reduced fuel burn and emissions.</p><p>Amid this huge piece of work, Nats continues to grapple with staffing shortages after a pause in recruitment during Covid and an exodus of controllers hired during the explosion of low-cost travel in the 1990s.</p><p>Only about 50 out of every 10,000 applicants make the grade. Training takes two years including 12 months in a control tower where recruits must be closely supervised, taking another person off the job.</p><p>Around 130 should qualify this year, enough for a small increase in overall numbers. That should ease pressure at sites such as Gatwick, which has been understaffed since Nats took over there in 2022, to the irritation of easyJet, the airport’s biggest user.</p><p>AI is expected to play an increasing role in air traffic control. It is already used to assess the aptitude of people for the job and in roles such as interfacing with runway cameras to monitor aircraft as they touch down with more accuracy than a human.</p><p>Nats is working with the Alan Turing Institute on an AI air traffic controller called a “buddy” that will one day work alongside staff, presenting flight options and making recommendations.</p><p>However, Rolfe says he is wary about affording the technology too much power.</p><p>He says: “AI holds a lot of promise but – unlike some sectors – we will be careful about how we apply it. Having a human in the loop is important, particularly as there is going to be a human in the cockpit for a long while to come.”</p></div></div></div></div></div>

<p>Britain’s air traffic control chief, Martin Rolfe, claims he was wrongly vilified for a major flight delay incident in summer 2023, which affected 700,000 passengers and cost airlines £65m. He criticized the invasion of his family's privacy and the intense social media backlash he faced. Despite accepting responsibility for the outage, he emphasized Nats's overall success in safety and performance since privatization. Rolfe is now preparing for a significant overhaul of UK airspace, which aims to modernize flight paths but may increase noise in previously quiet areas.</p>

I was wrongly vilified for holiday travel chaos, says air traffic control chief