Former Rolls-Royce chief to chair UK’s air traffic control provider

The UK’s air traffic control provider, National Air Traffic Services, has appointed former Rolls-Royce CE Warren East to be its new chair as the company looks to recover from a difficult period, including a technical meltdown that caused major disruption last August. Nats on Wednesday announced that East would join the board as non-executive chair on September 1, replacing Paul Golby, who has served in the role for a decade. East, who was CE of Rolls-Royce between 2015 and 2022, will join at a sensitive time for Nats, which has come under severe pressure from airlines for its operational performance over the past 12 months. Most notably, the UK’s air traffic control system failed over the August bank holiday weekend last summer, affecting more than 700,000 passengers during one of the busiest travel periods of the year. An interim report commissioned by industry regulator the Civil Aviation Authority last month found that fixing the technical problem that caused the failure was “more protracted than it might otherwise have been” because some senior engineers were not in the office over the bank holiday. Airlines have been highly critical of Nats’ response to the meltdown and called for compensation from the company to cover their costs, while Ryanair CE Michael O’Leary has repeatedly called for Nats CE Martin Rolfe to resign or be sacked. Nats, which is a public-private partnership owned by a group of airlines — including British Airways and easyJet — pension funds and the UK government, runs the airspace over the UK and the eastern part of the Atlantic. It also provides air traffic control services at many of the UK’s major airports, including London Gatwick. Golby said he had served “through some of the most difficult times that Nats and the aviation sector as a whole have been through”, after overseeing the company through the Covid pandemic, when air traffic services remained open, and the subsequent recovery. <br/>