RYANAIR and Wizz Air have urged the Transport Secretary to sack the head of Britain’s air traffic control provider after more than 1,750 flights were cancelled in a single day of chaos, with further disruption expected.

The airlines turned on NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe as fresh cancellations hit passengers for a second day running, following a technical failure that grounded flights across the country on Tuesday.

By 5am today, more than 1,900 flights had been cancelled over two days, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

On Tuesday alone, 1,762 flights in and out of UK airports were axed, including 902 departures and 860 arrivals out of 5,800 scheduled.

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A normal day usually sees under two per cent of flights cancelled.

Today, a further 153 flights have already been cancelled, with 55 departures and 98 arrivals hit so far.

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Ryanair‘s chief operations officer Neal McMahon said the airline alone had been forced to cancel 250 flights, warning the cost to the company would “run into the millions”.

Speaking to Times Radio Breakfast, he said: “Airlines across the UK cancelled over a thousand flights, and hundreds of thousands of people were disrupted because the lessons learned for the previous failures have not been delivered by Martin Rolfe.”

He added: “We have crews everywhere and it’s a real shambles because we couldn’t get our aircraft where they were meant to be yesterday. We had 250 flights cancelled, so really, really disruptive for us.”

McMahon said the meltdown was caused by exactly the same fault that triggered chaos in August 2023, when more than 700,000 passengers were hit after a rogue flight plan crashed the system.

He said: “NATS told us it was a flight planning processing failure, which is exactly the same issue that happened in 2023. If you remember in 2023 there was an issue with a flight plan, and it sent the system in a loop that eventually caused it to shut down.”

He said NATS had blamed a “spurious flight plan” this time, adding: “These things can happen, but where’s the backup systems? The failing is that the backup system was unable to kick in and work, it’s not a backup system if it shuts down. That’s the definition of a backup, is that when the primary system goes down, that you can revert and keep going.”

Asked directly if it was time for ministers to step in, Mr McMahon said: “Absolutely. We understand the Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, is going to meet with Martin Rolfe today and we think she should ask him to resign.”

He said Britain was lagging badly behind its European neighbours, adding: “We think it’s critical that we put in somebody in Nats at the top who can deliver resilience, who can deliver the extra staffing that’s needed so that NATS can perform as well as other ATC providers across Europe.

“We don’t see this in France, we don’t see this in Italy, we don’t see this in Spain, we don’t see this in Ireland, we don’t see this in Germany.

“This is a UK problem where the backup systems don’t kick in when the primary systems have a fault.”

Wizz Air also piled pressure on Mr Rolfe, with the airline’s UK managing director Yvonne Moynihan saying he should consider quitting after repeated failures.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Wizz Air suffered 24 cancellations and more than 21 long delays on Tuesday, with over 10,000 passengers affected at the Hungarian budget carrier alone.

She said: “It’s completely unacceptable that the travelling public has to pay for this.

“This is now the third time that we have had an ATC failure, and during the peak period as well. So major questions need to be asked.”

Asked whether Mr Rolfe should resign, she said: “In any industry when you’ve had three failures you need to consider three strikes and you’re out.”

NATS provides air traffic control services to 15 UK airports, and the fallout from Tuesday’s failure has continued to cause delays and disruption for tens of thousands of passengers into a second day.

Mr Rolfe apologised to passengers this morning and ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of the disruption.

He is due to meet Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander today amid mounting pressure on the Government to intervene in the crisis engulfing Britain’s skies.