Airlines say they will not have to bear the burden of paying passengers compensation if flights are canceled or disrupted due to strikes or flight disruptions.
“Airlines need redress… We can’t be the insurer of last resort for everything that goes wrong in our industry,” Loganair chief executive Jonathan Hinkles told MPs on the Transport Committee.
Senior airline officials said they will have to pay out millions of dollars to customers whose flights were canceled after a problem with British air traffic control led to thousands of flight cancellations and delays in August.
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has criticized the National Air Traffic Service (NATS) for the collapse of the system, saying it is synonymous with regulatory incompetence and mismanagement. CEO Martin Rolfe was fired.
The head of Ryanair said the chaos in air travel in August was caused by the “collapse of their system due to NATS”.
“They (the Nats) broke not only your primary system, but also your backup system, and all your technicians were sitting at home in the morning watching TV instead of being where they were supposed to be,” he said.
The chaos cost Ryanair £15 million in food, drink and accommodation costs for affected passengers. EasyJet chief commercial officer Sophie Dekkers said the losses were comparable to those of Ryanair.
Martin Rolfe told MPs that the flight plan that led to the NATS system failure was “incredibly unusual” and “unlike anything we have seen before”.
“As you may have heard, this was unusual not only because there were duplicate waypoints, but also the combination and order of them, and it was so different that the system decided the safest course of action was to stop processing and essentially , resolve them.” someone interferes.
“This is the foundation of our safety-critical systems.” … Our focus is not on cost, but on getting repairs done safely and getting traffic back on track,” Rolfe said.
Source: I News
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