Air traffic meltdown boss defends “working from home”

The major outage disrupted flight plans for almost 750,000 passengers last summer.

Low-cost airline Ryanair levied particularly strong criticism at Nats in the aftermath of the August incident. Its boss Michael O’Leary accused engineers of “sitting at home in their pyjamas”.

However, speaking to the Transport Committee on Tuesday about what Nats had done to make its systems resilient, Mr Rolfe defended his organisation’s staffing arrangements.

He said it operated a “very similar model to almost all of the rest of critical national infrastructure”.

He added that there were always engineers on site to solve problems, but more expert “design engineers” were needed for particularly complex issues.

Mr Rolfe said they were generally in the office during the week but could be on-call outside of normal working hours.

He insisted the situation last August “would have been worse” without remote working technology.

“We would have had to get them physically in immediately. Now we have the ability for them to log on appropriately and securely, remotely,” he said.

“In many cases, they fix the problem much more quickly than if they had to come into the office outside of normal hours. It’s an absolute advancement in how we deal with these things”.