Wizz Air, Ryanair call for NATS overhaul after UK flight disruption

LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters) - European budget carriers Wizz Air (WIZZ.L) , opens new tab and Ryanair (RYA.I) , opens new tab called on Tuesday for an overhaul of Britain's air traffic ​control provider NATS following a new technical issue that disrupted ‌hundreds of flights at key airports in the country. "A critical national infrastructure provider should not repeatedly bring the aviation system to a standstill. NATS is simply ​not fit for purpose in its current form," a spokesperson ​for Wizz Air said. Rival Ryanair also criticised the agency ⁠and called for the resignation of its CEO, Martin Rolfe. "Following the ​2023 collapse, we were told lessons would be learned. We were ​told 'resilience would improve'. We were told the systems had been fixed. Yet here we are again," Ryanair Chief Operations Officer Neal McMahon said. NATS said it had implemented ​a fix to the latest issue and was working with ​airlines and airports to get things back to normal. "We are continuing to work closely ‌with ⁠our airline and airport customers on recovery. We apologise sincerely for the disruption to people's journeys today and they should continue to check with their airline," a spokesperson said in a statement. In 2024, Britain's ​aviation regulator said ​NATS needed ⁠to review its contingency plans for outages after the automatic processing of flight plans malfunctioned a year ​earlier, causing chaos across Britain's airports. The Civil Aviation Authority ​said ⁠on Tuesday it had been in touch with NATS over the incident and expects the latter to share a full report. "We will then consider ⁠whether ​any further steps need to be taken ​to help secure the safe reliability of the UK's air traffic control system," a ​CAA spokesperson said.