Fury as Brits could pay more for flights after air traffic control summer chaos
Airlines have threatened to raise plane ticket prices after a bump in the amount they have to pay for air traffic control services.
The amount that aviation firms will have to pay to fund the UK's air traffic control system will rise by 43p per passenger after widespread disruption this summer, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said today. The average charge will go from £47 to £64 per service unit - a measure of a flight's distance and weight - for the period between 2023 and 2027.
It is a rise of 36%, although, when accounting for inflation since 2020, the rise is 26%, the CAA said. It means that the average charge per passenger will rise by around 43p to around £2.08 per passenger per flight.
Despite the increase the charge is still lower than the average level between 2015 and 2019, the CAA said. It is also "broadly in line" with European counterparts, the aviation body added. The rise has been out forward so the firm which runs air traffic control systems in the UK - called Nerl - can recoup losses made during Covid. This recovery has been spread over 10 years.
Passengers were disrupted when air traffic control systems were hit by an IT issue over the summer (Bloomberg via Getty Images)"Our decision will provide the resources and investment required for Nerl to provide a resilient, high-quality service for passengers and modernise its services, while recovering costs from the pandemic, which is consistent with the traffic risk sharing arrangements in Nerl's licence at the time," said CAA chief economist Andrew Walker.
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Tim Alderslade, the boss of trade body Airlines UK, said that the change could mean higher prices for customers.
"This is yet another kick in the teeth for passengers who have been plagued by issues this summer including the August Nats IT failure and will inevitably end up footing the bill of millions of pounds for increases that simply cannot be justified while it remains unclear what action will be taken to ensure airlines and their customers do not see a repeat of this disruption," he said.
Customers may question why the cost increase has to be passed on to them. Over the summer Irish low-cost airline Ryanair announced that its net profit multiplied fourfold in the first three months of 2023, reaching over £600million despite a significant increase in costs. Low-cost airline easyJet reported record pre-tax profits of £203mn for the three months to the end of June, up from a £114mn loss a year earlier.
The failures earlier this summer caused widespread disruption to thousands of flights across the UK. The problems at National Air Traffic Services (NATS) in August forced airlines to pay for passengers' accommodation, and cancel around 2,000 flights.
After an IT issue caused the NATS system to go down, illness among air traffic controllers at Gatwick Airport led to dozens of flights being grounded at the Sussex travel hub.
Former air traffic controller and now editor of Turning Left for Less Michele Robson told the Mirror at the time that the issues - which flared up to a lesser degree earlier this month as well - are far from resolved.
She said that staffing had been a "constant issue" in the airport's towers after NATS took control of the system overnight in 2022, when German firm ATN stopped running the system seven years into its decade long contract.
As it takes around 18 months to train ATC staff - and even longer at busy Gatwick which has just one runway - firms working in the semi-privatised system can struggle to get their rotas full enough. One pilot told the Mirror that staff were employed to "exact levels" with "no stretch to allow for staff sickness".
News of the air traffic control charge increase came as Heathrow Airport announced that it will handle more passengers this year than previously expected after another summer of recovery in the travel market.
The airport, based to the west of London, also saw its losses shrink for the first nine months of 2023 as a result. It said on Thursday that it expects to see 79.3 million passengers use the site this year, ahead of previous predictions of between 70 million and 78 million.
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Heathrow said it welcomed 29 million passengers this summer, taking the total for the first nine months of the year to 59 million. It saw revenues increase by around 30% to £2.74 billion for the nine-month period as a result.
The airport business therefore saw its losses shrink considerably to £19 million for the period, from a £442 million loss over the same period last year. It comes a week after the UK competition watchdog said it was broadly in favour of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) regulator's plan to reduce how much Heathrow could charge airlines.
The CAA said the cap on Heathrow's average charge per passenger must be reduced from £31.57 for 2023 and last year to £25.43 over the next three years.
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