Thousands of passengers have been hit by flight delays because of high sickness rates among air traffic controllers combined with a refusal to work overtime, according to an official report.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said that delays at one of Britain’s busiest airports increased last year because there were too few staff to provide normal levels of air traffic control.
Ryanair said that 100,000 passengers had been subjected to delays at Stansted airport in the first six months of last year and claimed that air traffic controllers gave flights into Heathrow priority.
The CAA began an inquiry into the allegations aimed at Nats (formerly National Air Traffic Services), which is 49 per cent owned by the government. It found that Nats had not breached its operator’s licence. However, the watchdog criticised its failure to maintain staffing levels at its headquarters in Swanwick, Hampshire.
The report, published yesterday, told of higher than expected short-term sickness, unplanned retirements and a low rate of overtime take-up due to unfavourable industrial relations.
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Ryanair, Europe’s busiest airline, which has a huge base at Stansted, complained that staff shortages at Nats had “resulted in significant delays”. It said delays were 14 times higher in the first six months of last year than in the same period in 2015. It said that 395 of its flights were delayed at Stansted because of Nats staff shortages in the first half of last year, compared with 161 British Airways flights at Heathrow. This was in spite of Heathrow handling, according to the report, more than three times the number of flights.
Stansted said that on the weekend of July 2 and 3 last year, controller shortages meant that ten flights per hour were allowed to land at the airport, or 65 per cent fewer than normal.
The report recommended forcing Nats to be “more proactive and transparent” about staffing problems and improve its process for forecasting shortfalls in controllers on certain routes.
A Nats spokeswoman said: “The safe air traffic control service that we provide to 2.5 million flights per year is recognised by our customers as one of the best and most resilient anywhere in the world. We continually seek to refine our operation particularly in light of the substantial and unforeseen growth of traffic across the southeast of the UK since early 2016. We are pleased to confirm that we have already taken a number of the actions referred to in the CAA’s report.”