RYANAIR is suing Britain’s air traffic control HQ for £5million after a work-from-home engineer ruined 700,000 passengers’ travel plans.
High Court papers show the technician spent more than an hour fruitlessly trying to log on remotely to fix a glitch at the National Air Traffic Service.
The “Level 2”; specialist finally set off for its Southampton HQ by car on the peak August 2023 Bank Holiday weekend — when “traffic congestion”; meant it took 95 minutes to get there, the papers show.
The glitch was soon corrected — four hours after it was first flagged — when engineers called the software maker.
But by then flights had been grounded nationwide. The travel misery lasted days owing to knock-on effects.
Dublin-based Ryanair — which paid NATS £70million in 2022 — claims the service took three hours to alert it to the problem, and 1,000 of its own flights from the UK were delayed or cancelled.
The airline, which carries around 200 million passengers a year, accuses NATS of negligence and is seeking an estimated £4.52million in compensation, sources say, plus legal costs and interest on losses.
NATS denies the claim and the case continues at London’s High Court.
At the time of the chaos, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary blasted NATS engineers for “sitting at home in their pyjamas”; on one of the “busiest travel weekends of the year”;.
Problems with remote log-ins were raised in a Civil Aviation Authority report last year which called for technicians to be permanently rostered on site.
Meanwhile, Mr O’Leary has warned that air traffic staff shortages could see the worst disruption in decades this year.
