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.
He ruled out a cyber attack.
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.
Obviously my focus and that of the team has been on both getting our system operating back up normally, which it is now. But there’s obviously a huge tail to the disruption. And we’ll be working on that through the course of today.
And then obviously our attention will turn to exactly what’s happened, this particular incident. What I will say is I don’t believe we’ve ever seen an incident happen more than once. So this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation.
Rolfe insisted that Nats dealt with the issue as quickly as it could:
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,but within the limits of making sure that it all stayed safe.
