Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has branded NATS’ preliminary report into its recent system failure ‘ludicrous’, ‘bogus’ and ‘full of rubbish’.

Thousands of holidaymakers were stranded when the computer systems at NATS – the national air-traffic control services provider for the UK – went into meltdown on August 28, with a preliminary report into the root causes issued on Monday.

Mr O’Leary lacerated the report in a lengthy statement from Ryanair – and in an accompanying video – with the findings labelled a ‘whitewash’ and ‘numerous inaccuracies’ within it listed.

‘NATS claims 1,500 flights were cancelled, whereas Eurocontrol [a civil-military aviation support group] confirms “over 2,000” fewer flights over the UK that day,’ Ryanair’s statement said.

‘NATS claims just 575 flights were “delayed”, which is nonsense when over 1,000 Ryanair flights alone to, from, and over the UK that day were delayed.’

The budget Irish airline also claimed that ‘NATS knew of this system collapse at 8.32am’ but that ‘the airlines were not advised until three hours later’, adding: ‘Ryanair was first notified by Eurocontrol – not NATS – just after 11am on Monday 28.’

In a further comment, Ryanair added: ‘NATS’ second line engineering team were “supporting remotely to reduce travel time”, which is a cover-up of the fact that they were sitting at home doing nothing useful.’

The airline also questioned why the air traffic control provider does not have a 24-hour back-up system instead of the ‘four-hours of back-up flight plans’ it said NATS claims to have.

It added: ‘NATS fails to explain why one inaccurate flight plan brought down not just the NATS ATC system, but also its “back-up” system. ‘Clearly NATS’ back-up system is useless when the entire infrastructure can be brought down by one inaccurate flight plan filing.’

Addressing the issue of refunds, Ryanair said NATS, which is part-owned by the UK government, has ‘a moral obligation to reimburse its customers for its lamentable incompetence which caused the cancellation of over 2,000 flights – 360,000 passengers – and delayed more than 5,000 flights – 900,000 passengers – on Monday 28 and Tuesday, 29 August’.

It added: ‘NATS claims that it is “not within its remit” to provide cost reimbursement and compensation for airlines. This is false.

‘NATS are free to, and should provide, cost reimbursement to airlines for the millions of pounds in hotels, meal costs and alternative transport reimbursements.’

Mr O’Leary said the report is ‘factually inaccurate’ and ‘ridiculously understates the number of flights that were cancelled or delayed through the NATS system failure’.

He added: ‘NATS should explain why its back-up system failed, and what they are doing to introduce an effective back-up system, rather than the rubbish they have at the moment. They should also explain why their second-line engineering team was sitting at home… instead of being on-site and on the job.

‘Ryanair pays NATS almost €100million per year for an ATC service that is repeatedly short-staffed. The least NATS could and should do is to reimburse its airline customers for the tens of millions of pounds they have spent reimbursing passengers for their hotel, meals and transport expenses, which were entirely due to NATS system failure.

‘If NATS fail to reimburse its customers for these expenses, then Secretary of Transport Mark Harper should intervene – as the largest shareholder in NATS – and instruct NATS to reimburse NATS’ airline customers for these right-to-care expenses.’

Ryanair rival easyJet said the NATS report left some questions unanswered and called for a wide-ranging examination of its resources and IT systems ‘to ensure it is fit for purpose today and in the future’.

Willie Walsh, director general of airline industry body IATA, said in a blog post that NATS management had ‘some serious explaining to do’.

He also called for compensation to airlines and repairs to the control system funded by NATS budgets.

The cause of the crash 

NATS CEO Martin Rolfe said a ‘one in 15 million’ computer failing in Britain’s air traffic control system was to blame for the chaos.

The preliminary NATS report said a single flight plan with two identically labelled markers caused the chaos.

The flight plan met European standards but included two identically named but separate waypoints or navigational markers outside UK airspace, which forced the system – and its back-up – to enter a ‘fail-safe’ mode.

The system had faced the dilemma of neither being able to reject the flight plan without knowing what impact that might have, nor approve it and hence risk providing wrong safety-critical information.

‘It therefore stopped operating, avoiding any opportunity for incorrect data being passed to a controller,’ the report said.

The subsequent switch to manual processing meant the average number of plans that could be handled dropped from around 400 per hour to as few as 60, leading to restrictions on flights to and from UK airports.

NATS told MailOnline Travel it ‘stands by’ its report.

A NATS spokesperson said: ‘We stand by our report, which clearly explains the root cause, how our operation was recovered safely and the solution that is now in place to ensure it cannot happen again.

‘It is a preliminary report that makes clear the areas we continue to look at.’

Politics dampens optimism: US downgrade reflects the failure to put a lid on federal spending, says ALEX BRUMMER

By Alex Brummer for the Daily Mail

Updated: 16:54 EDT, 2 August 2023

Some links in this article may be affiliate links. If you click on them we may earn a small commission. That helps us fund This Is Money, and keep it free to use. We do not write articles to promote products. We do not allow any commercial relationship to affect our editorial independence.

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Michigan football’s Jim Harbaugh is blaming failures in the vetting process for the doomed hiring of legendary Wolverines coach Bo Schembechler’s son, who resigned over offensive tweets only days after joining the athletic department last month. 

‘Once I became aware of things that were offensive — offensive to me, offensive to other members of our team — [we acted],’ Harbaugh said, as quoted by MLive.com. ‘We didn’t want that mindset around.’

Glenn ‘Shemy’ Schembechler stepped down on May 20, just days after he had been hired as assistant director of recruiting on Harbaugh’s staff. The Detroit News reported at the time that Schembechler’s Twitter feed contained posts and likes of offensive material, including some that suggested slavery and Jim Crow were positives to strengthen African-American individuals and families.

‘You should practice readying/comprehension,’ read one post, liked by Shemy. ‘And yes, slavery and Jim Crow forced the black family to strive and create businesses and cultivate a basis for wealth for themselves and their progeny.’

Entering his ninth season as coach at his alma mater, Harbaugh said the program outsourced the vetting to another company, which failed to catch the offending social media posts. 

‘I read the report myself,’ Harbaugh said. ‘We have a company that vets that — social media — and they came back and [cleared him]. We’ve got a new company doing that 1685708054, but they’ve got to be better.

‘I’ll take responsibility for that. If somebody can find that in a day, then we have to be better ourselves.’ 

Harbaugh played quarterback under Bo Schembechler at Michigan before going on to an NFL career and then moving into coaching.

Schembechler played for his father, who coached Michigan from 1969-89, and was later an NFL scout. In a statement released Sunday night, Schembechler said that his life, and that of his father and family, has been devoted to the best in people, regardless of their race or religion. He said he had ‘inexplicably and irresponsibly’ liked items on social media.

‘What I do for a living is far less important than for people to know what is in my heart, and has been … instilled in me by my pioneering father,’ said Schembechler’s statement released by the public relations firm of Rose + Allyn.

‘By inexplicably and irresponsibly liking things on social media I owe an unabashed and unequivocal apology to my hundreds of friends and fellow coaches in the Black community, all communities … . Any words or philosophies that in any way seek to underplay the immeasurable suffering and long-term economic and social inequities that hundreds of years of slavery and the ‘Jim Crow’ era caused for Black Americans is wrong. I was wrong.’

Schembechler went on to apologize ‘profusely’ to anyone he had offended and said he was hoping for ‘forgiveness based on my expansive life’s work, and not any moment of indiscretion.’

‘We are aware of some comments and likes on social media that have caused concern and pain for individuals in our community,’ Harbaugh and athletic director Warde Manuel said in a statement after the younger Schembechler resigned. ‘Michigan Athletics is fully committed to a place where our coaches, staff and student-athletes feel welcome and where we fully support the University’s and Athletic Department’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.’

The Schembechler family has been in the news over the last several years for a pair of scandals.

In addition to Shemy’s emails, there are allegations that Bo ignored complaints of sexual abuse against then-team doctor Robert Anderson, allowing the physician to abuse hundreds of men and some women between 1966 and 2003.

In January of 2022, the school finalized $490 million in settlements with more than 1,000 people who say they were sexually assaulted by a former sports doctor.

Anderson worked at the university from 1966 until his 2003 retirement and was director of the university’s Health Service and a physician for multiple athletic teams, including football. A number of football players and other athletes have come forward to accuse Anderson, who died in 2008, of sexually abusing them.

The issue rocked the campus, where many felt that Bo could have stopped Anderson decades earlier.

In November of 2021, a statue of Schembechler was vandalized with red paint and a message supporting the sexual assault victims.

Written in black on the steps was ‘Bo knew’ and ‘#hailtothevictims,’ which is a reference to the school fight song, ‘[Hail to] The Victors.’

Former Michigan football players have said they told Bo Schembechler in the 1970s about Anderson’s behavior during physical exams.

Schembechler’s other son, Matt, said he told his father that Anderson assaulted him as a child.

However, Glenn Schembechler and Harbaugh both remain skeptical that Bo was aware that Anderson was doing anything unacceptable during exams.

Schembechler, who died in 2006, is hailed as the greatest coach of college football’s winningest program. He led the Wolverines from 1969-89, won 194 games at the school, and had 234 victories including wins over six seasons at Miami of Ohio.

Vladimir Putin has led Russia to abject failure with his invasion of Ukraine, the head of the Russian Wagner mercenary group has said in an astonishing outburst.

Far from demilitarising Ukraine – Russia’s key war aim – Putin’s botched strategy has seen Kyiv amass ‘one of the world’s strongest armies’ through massive Western supplies, Yevgeny Prigozhin said.

The Wagner chief was once considered a close ally and confidant of Russia’s tyrant and had been nicknamed Putin’s ‘chef’. But in the latest of his increasingly frequent outbursts, Prigozhin has given a devastating critique of his war strategy.

He then warned of impending ‘revolution’ in Russia unless changes were made by the Kremlin leadership.

In an astonishing attack on military leaders, he said Russia would restore the death penalty and the guilty – he named defence ministry Sergei Shoigu and chief of the defence staff Valery Gerasimov as responsible for the war crisis – would be ‘hanged on Red Square’.

Prigozhin blamed both Shoigu and Gerasimov for losing more men in Bakhmut than in the entire ten-year Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1979-89, which eventually led to the collapse of the USSR.

‘So the de-nazification of Ukraine, which we announced – we made Ukraine a nation, known to everyone around the globe,’ he said, mocking Putin’s warped purpose for going to war.

‘They are like Greeks at their peak, or Romans.’

He told interviewer Konstantin Dolgov – a prominent pro-war blogger: ‘We legitimised Ukraine, it became a country which is known to everyone.

‘As for de-militarisation… [this is] a painful issue indeed.

‘So if they had at the start of it 500 tanks – now they have 5,000. If there were 20,000 men who were able to fight – now there are 400,000. So how exactly did we demilitarise it?

‘Quite the opposite! We militarised it up to the brim.

‘I think Ukrainians today are one of the world’s strongest armies. They have high levels of organisation, training, military intelligence. 

‘They have various ammunition and moreover, they are able to switch between any system – Soviet, Nato, anything at all – with the same success. They take their losses philosophically.

‘All they do is to achieve the supreme goal, just like us during the Great Patriotic War [Second World War].’

Prigozhin’s armed force of convicts and volunteers – named Wagner private military company – has claimed to have taken Bakhmut but at a devastating toll.

He admitted that in Bakhmut his force had lost 10,000 prisoners freed to fight for Putin, and the same number of volunteers. Many experts estimate the Wagner losses to be higher.

Prigozhin then claimed Ukraine had lost 50,000 with 70,000 wounded.

‘During the [special military operation] I pulled out 50,000 inmates from jails,’ he said. Twenty per cent of them died.’

Adding to the latest of his outbursts, Prigozhin said he saw Shoigu and Gerasimov as guilty, not least for failing to supply Wagner with ammunition and weapons.

‘Without a doubt the death penalty will be brought back, because we are in a state of war,’ he said.

And the guilty people will receive their punishment – as a minimum, they’ll be hanged on the Red Square.’

He lambasted the comfortable elites in Russia who continued to live normally while cannon fodder troops at the front lost their lives in huge numbers.

Their sons must be forced to the war, he said.

He singled out the defence minister Sergei Shoigu, whose daughter and son -in-law flaunt their wealth on social media.

While last year it emerged the foreign minister Sergey Lavrov’s stepdaughter owns a £4 million luxury apartment in Kensington, London.

Mr Prigozhin said: ‘Everything might end as in 1917, with a revolution, when first the soldiers rise up and then their loved ones.

‘The children of the elite smear themselves with creams and show off on the internet, while ordinary people’s children come home in zinc [coffins] torn to pieces.

‘I recommend the elite of the Russian Federation gathers up its youth and sends them to war. They live fat, carefree lives, their villas should be stormed by ordinary people armed with pitchforks.

‘How can Shoigu’s son-in-law go to the United Arab Emirates and shake his bum around?’

Prigozhin warned of the real threat of Russia losing the war.

The warlord said he now ‘hardly believes’ it possible that Russia can see through one of the most optimistic scenarios of holding on to the territory it now has.

The ‘pessimistic scenario’, he said, is that Ukraine can ‘restore the 2014 borders, they will try to attack Crimea, destroy the Crimean Bridge, and cut off routes of supply. 

‘And most likely the scenario won’t be good for us,’ he said.

Russia ‘must prepare for a heavy war. What must we do – not to lose Russia? Because today we are in a state when we can lose Russia.

‘We must introduce martial law. We must call new waves of mobilisation. We must switch everyone to production of weapons.

‘Stop building skyscrapers, new roads, new infrastructure – and work only for the war. We must live like in North Korea for several years, and shut the borders.’

Analysts are also suggesting the head of Russia’s private army could be the man to topple Putin, by standing against him in next year’s presidential elections. 

The Kremlin is understood to be growing increasingly concerned by Prigozhin’s criticisms and his popularity.

At the May 9th Victory Day parade in Moscow, Putin pointedly excluded the Wagner group from his speech praising the efforts of Russian soldiers.

But without the paramilitary group’s soldiers, Russia’s campaign in Ukraine would collapse.

Bailey takes prices blame: The Bank of England’s failure to attack inflation earlier is proving very costly, says ALEX BRUMMER

By Alex Brummer for the Daily Mail

Published: 17:23 EDT, 23 May 2023 | Updated: 17:23 EDT, 23 May 2023

Some links in this article may be affiliate links. If you click on them we may earn a small commission. That helps us fund This Is Money, and keep it free to use. We do not write articles to promote products. We do not allow any commercial relationship to affect our editorial independence.

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