NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe said the organisation had ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of the disruption, but detailed technical evidence has not yet been published and is expected to form part of the investigation ordered by Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander.
Speaking on BBC radio Wednesday morning, Rolfe said: “Obviously, we will be doing a thorough and full investigation, but at this point we have ruled out it being a cyber-attack”.
When challenged, Rolfe defended his position, saying that the failures over the last few years have had different root causes. He also insisted that the organisation’s engineers were in place and software partners were ‘on hand’ to resolve the issues as soon as possible.
Following the radio interview, Rolfe was summoned to a meeting with the Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander where she expressed ‘significant concerns’ regarding the outage and chaos it caused, according to the Prime Minister’s official spokesman.
The spokesman added that the Transport Secretary had ordered a full investigation over what had happened, and how. This report is deadlined for Wednesday next week.
Given that the latest failure is the third serious incident suffered by NATS in as many years, serious pressure is mounting on Rolfe with airlines calling for him to be sacked. However, the government has retained confidence in Martin Rolfe for the immediate task of investigating the outage, but that confidence is now being tested by mounting industry pressure and will likely be reassessed once the investigation reports back.
