The beleaguered boss of the UK’s air traffic control network said he became the “most disliked” person in the country after a computer meltdown led to the cancellation of 2,200 flights.
Martin Rolfe, the chief executive of National Air Traffic Services (Nats), admitted he was “definitely unpopular” following the incident on Sept 8, which left 330,000 passengers stranded.
Speaking at the Airlines 2026 conference, he said: “My name is Martin Rolfe. I’m the CEO of Nats – or as I like to think of myself, the most disliked person in the UK in September.”
He added: “I don’t actually limit it to CEOs. I was possibly the most disliked person.”
Mr Rolfe, who has faced calls to resign over the issue, which hit flights across southern Britain, said it was “completely understandable” that people had turned on him after the disruption to their holidays.
He said: “People, families, travel on average once a year; they go on their holidays and they spend an awful lot of their disposable income. I was definitely unpopular.”
Nats suffered a further fault later in September that prevented another 30,000 people from travelling to and from airports across northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Mr Rolfe said while Nats was working to improve the resilience of its systems using AI, he could not guarantee there would be no repeat of the failure.
He said: “I’m not going to sit here and say that nothing will ever happen because that would be ridiculous and no one would believe me.
“There are billions and billions of combinations of things happening at any moment and very, very occasionally those things interact in a way that nobody had foreseen.”
He added: “I don’t think that’s unusual in this kind of industry. It’s not frequent, it’s normally measured in years, not months or weeks.”
Mr Rolfe, who has presided over four major air traffic meltdowns as Nats chief, said he was not thinking of resigning, rejecting demands that he should be sacked, which have been led by Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair.
He said: “That is something he says all the time to pretty much everyone, so I’m not going to spend too much time worrying about that.
“You stick your head above the parapet, lead from the front and do everything you can to resolve it.”
Mr Rolfe told The Telegraph in March that he had felt persecuted for his role in a Nats blackout that disrupted flights for 700,000 people over the August bank holiday weekend in 2023, costing airlines £65m.
He said then that the backlash had included the invasion of his family’s privacy and that society had “become intolerant of anything failing”.
Rob Bishton, the chief executive of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), told the conference that while a zero-tolerance approach to things going wrong was unrealistic, Nats ought to spend more to boost resilience and maintain public confidence.
The CAA is conducting a review of the September breakdowns after being ordered to do so by the Government.