Technical issue at air traffic control provider Nats leads to over 1,300 flight cancellations to and from UK airports; oil prices rise towards $100 a barrel for first time since July
The boss of National Air Traffic Services, Martin Rolfe, has ruled out a cyber attack as a cause of the flight chaos, and apologised to passengers caught up in the flight chaos caused by a system issue on Tuesday, and said he understands their frustration –- but stressed that safety comes first.
Speaking to BBC radio 4’s Today programme, he said:
I’d like to start, as you might expect, by apologising to everyone who’s been impacted by the issue that we had yesterday.
In terms of the recovery, I absolutely understand the frustration. There is nothing we hate more than delaying people, and not allowing them to get to their destination. It disrupts airports and disrupts airlines. And we absolutely take accountability and responsibility for that. That is our job. But our job is also to make sure that people stay safe. We never do this lightly.
We will be doing a very, very thorough and full investigation. We have at this point ruled out cyber. We don’t believe it was a cyber attack.
We had everybody on site. Everybody was in the right place. We had all the engineers in place. We had our various partners from software industries and so on, all on hand. So this was resolved as quickly as it could be.
