Nats chief paid £2.2m in bonuses despite repeated air traffic failures

However, further air traffic control chaos ensued earlier this week on Tuesday, which resulted in the cancellation of around 2,200 flights in the UK.

Delays continued into Wednesday, with knock-on disruption hitting airports including Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted.

Mr Rolfe’s pay is around 38 times higher than the average UK salary of £39,000, the Telegraph reports.

It is also roughly 15 times higher than that of Nats’ best-paid air traffic controllers.

Last year, a radar system failure at Nats’ Swanwick headquarters near Southampton forced 150 flights to be cancelled, delaying tens of thousands of passengers.

Nats paid Mr Rolfe, 54, a bonus of £768,000 for that year alone, figures from the organisation’s annual accounts has revealed.

That figure did not include his salary, benefits or pension contributions, which added a further £598,000.

In total, Rolfe, who has been Nats’ CEO for almost 11 years, received £1.42million for the 2025-26 financial year, which ended in March.

This marked a slight decrease from the £1.49million he received the previous year.

His 2026 bonus was split between £343,000 linked to personal performance, described as a record high in Nats’ 25-year history and a further £425,000 from the company’s long-term incentive plan.

Three years earlier, in 2023, a separate failure caused the closure of the entire UK airspace, after a Nats software system responsible for processing flight plans crashed irreparably.

The resulting chaos affected 700,000 travellers, with airlines worldwide left to cover a £65million bill - it was considered to be the most damaging air traffic control outage in British history.

Mr Rolfe received a £106,000 bonus alongside a £459,000 long-term incentive top-up that year.

Nats’ remuneration committee also awarded him a 6.5 per cent pay rise that year, pushing his base salary above £500,000.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander described the latest outage, which disrupted the journeys of more than 330,000 people, as avoidable.

Her comments have further intensified scrutiny of Rolfe’s position.

On Thursday, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary renewed his demand for Mr Rolfe to be sacked, branding his reassurances "worthless".

Mr O’Leary said: "Martin Rolfe has demonstrated again and again and again over the last three years that he is incompetent."

"He is not fit to run UK ATC [air traffic control] and he’s certainly not the person to put in charge of repairing whatever is going on with this shambolic system.

"Let’s not have politicians telling us ’lessons will be learnt’."

Sources suggested Ms Alexander is unlikely to act on the industry’s calls for Mr Rolfe’s removal.

Nats was formed 1962 and was deliberately separated from its regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, three decades later to eliminate potential conflicts of interest.

The organisation now operates as a public-private partnership, with the government holding a 49 per cent stake.

A group of airlines, including British Airways, own 42 per cent of the remaining shares, with the final five per cent held by Nats staff.

Nats does not control the entirety of UK airspace - it is only responsible for managing above 7,000ft, alongside air traffic duties at 15 airports.

The organisation runs two main control centres, based in Swanwick, Hampshire, and Prestwick, Ayrshire.

It employs almost 5,000 staff in total, including 1,800 air traffic controllers and 1,000 engineers.

On Wednesday, a spokesman for Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirmed he has confidence in the Nats chief.

Defending the Government’s response in Parliament on Thursday, transport minister Keir Mather said he and Ms Alexander had met Mr Rolfe the previous morning.

He said: "We have agreed that he will send a report to us by Wednesday, September 16, setting out the cause of the incident and the actions that are being taken to ensure that this cannot happen again."

A Nats spokesman said: "Due to the continued efforts of airlines, airports and others across the industry, recovery of the aviation network is proceeding well.

"We recognise that some passengers are still experiencing disruption, and we apologise sincerely to all those affected by Tuesday’s technical issue.

"We are very much aware of the additional pressure this has placed on colleagues across the industry, and thank them for their continued hard work.

"A full investigation is already underway. We will report to the Secretary of State for Transport and Civil Aviation Authority next week."