The technology behind the air traffic control failure that grounded flights at Bristol Airport earlier this month could become impossible to repair after 2030, according to reports published this weekend, as the Nats chief executive fights to keep his job.
The National Airspace System (Nas), the decades-old central flight processor that manages every aircraft crossing UK skies, is due to become "unsupported" from 2030, meaning there would be no guarantee it could be fixed if it failed again, The Times reported on Saturday. "If it works, fine, but when it breaks, it's gone," a Nats insider told the paper, comparing the risk to owning equipment whose manufacturer no longer exists.
GB News, citing the same reporting, said on Sunday that Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe is required to deliver preliminary findings from an internal investigation into the 8 September outage to regulators this week. That fault triggered more than 2,000 flight cancellations across the UK, including days of delays and cancellations at Bristol Airport, and has already prompted a separate independent review by the Civil Aviation Authority ordered by Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander.
Rolfe has led Nats, which is 49% owned by the taxpayer, since 2015 and has faced calls to resign after the organisation's third major IT collapse in three years. A Whitehall source told GB News "the buck stops with him," although other industry figures cautioned that removing Rolfe alone would not fix the deeper problem: a replacement system, originally due to launch in 2015, has been repeatedly delayed and now has n