Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has ordered Martin Rolfe, chief executive of National Air Traffic Services (NATS), to hand her a report by next Wednesday explaining the technical failure that led to the cancellation of around 2,000 flights this week. Mr Rolfe faces mounting pressure to resign after the outage disrupted roughly 330,000 passengers, with Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary branding his position "untenable" and accusing him of lying about the cause. The incident has renewed scrutiny of NATS's safety record, given Mr Rolfe received £2.2million in bonuses over three years despite two major air traffic control failures since 2023.

Alexander said she met Rolfe within 24 hours of the incident and has separately asked the Civil Aviation Authority to conduct an independent six-month review, saying it "wouldn't be right for NATS to be marking their own homework". O'Leary claimed NATS initially blamed the outage on a "rogue flight plan" — the same cause identified in a 2023 failure that disrupted 700,000 passengers — but that Rolfe later denied this, insisting the cause was "something different". A separate outage in July 2025 also caused hundreds of flight cancellations. Downing Street has said it retains confidence in Rolfe, and Alexander said she would not rush to judgment ahead of the reports.