Air traffic control boss defends engineers’ remote working

The head of the UK’s air traffic control provider has defended allowing engineers to work from home following last summer’s technical failure that led to nationwide flight disruption.

Martin Rolfe, chief executive of NATS, formerly National Air Traffic Services, told the transport select committee yesterday that it was a “bonus” and an “absolute advancement” that air traffic engineers could solve problems remotely. He added though, that they were typically on-site.

Last month, the Civil Aviation Authority published an interim report into IT system failures on the August bank holiday which led to flights being grounded and disruption to more than 700,000 passengers.

One of the factors the CAA identified had led to protracted air traffic control failure was that a senior engineer took 90 minutes to arrive on-site to perform a full system restart, which was not permitted remotely.

Rolfe said that since 2016, NATS has had 54,000 technical issues and that approximately 99.98% of those problems are solved by its first response engineers. “The vast majority of problems are solved by people who are on-site all the time,” he told MPs.

“When things become particularly complex that’s when we go to our design engineers” who get called in relatively rarely “when we really don’t understand the problem.”

This relatively small number of engineers cover multiple systems and don’t have “one particular place to be”, he added.

He said NATS operated a “very similar model to almost all of the rest of critical national infrastructure” in its first, second and third-line engineering. Those not on site will be rostered “on call”.

Iain Stewart, the committee’s chair, said that media commentary following the CAA report had suggested that some of the failures had been a “symptom of the working from home culture”.

Last month Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary slammed NATS engineers for “sitting at home in their pyjamas” on one of the “busiest travel weekends of the year for air travel”.

Stewart asked Rolfe if second-line engineers working remotely had been in place for a long time or if it had been post-pandemic.

Rolfe said he believed all specialist engineers typically work on-site. “The working from home piece,” Rolfe said, “was actually more of a bonus because we now have the technology since the pandemic to allow them – when they are outside of their hours where they would normally be working at work – if they are called on-call, then they can immediately work remotely to try and diagnose the problem.

“Before the pandemic, it would have been worse. We would have had to have got them physically in, immediately. Now, we have the ability for them to log on appropriately and securely remotely, and in many cases, they fix the problem much more quickly than if they had to come into the office outside of normal hours. So it’s an absolute advancement in how we deal with these things.”

The CAA’s full report into the air traffic chaos on 28 August 2023 is expected later in the year.

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