Airlines have reacted for immediate action to prevent further air traffic control cancellations after Gatwick airport was impacted by further disruptions. Flights at the UK airport experienced cancellations and disruption on 14 September caused according to media reports by a shortage of air traffic controllers at NATS. It follows an outage at NATS in August that saw the system for processing flights across the UK and its backup fail, resulting in significant delays and cancellations across the country, enraging airlines. That was estimated by IATA to have cost carriers up to £100 million ($124 million). Ryanair's group chief executive Michael O'Leary has called on NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe to stand down over the incident. "It is unacceptable that more flights and hundreds of passengers are suffering delays to/from Gatwick Airport for a third time in just two weeks due to NATS chief executive, Martin Rolfe’s blatant failure to adequately staff UK ATC,” O’Leary says. “Airlines are paying millions of pounds to NATS each and every year and should not have to see their passengers suffer avoidable delays due to UK ATC staff shortages. We call on Martin Rolfe to immediately resign and hand the job over to someone competent enough to do it.” EasyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren, says that recent staff shortages at NATS have “plagued the industry” causing over a month’s worth of disruption. “This cannot be allowed to continue. Immediate action must be taken to fix the staffing shortages now while a more wide-ranging review examines broader issues to ensure NATS delivers robust services to passengers now and in the future,” he continues. Gatwick notes that, as of the morning of 15 September, its ATC facilities are fully staffed and the airport is operating normally. NATS and Gatwick has been approached for comment.

The US Federal Aviation Administration has renewed the Category 1 safety rating for Mexican airlines, lifting a freeze on the ability of carriers from that country to add new routes and frequencies to the USA, along with a freeze on their ability to add new aircraft to their US network. Mexican carriers regained this top safety rating on 14 September after 28 months of sitting in Category 2. That downgrade cost Mexico's airlines around $1 billion, Bloomberg Intelligence estimates, by causing them to miss out on potential revenue growth through US routes and through the inability to replace older aircraft on its US network with newer aircraft that are more fuel-efficient and have more seats. US airlines can also resume marketing and selling tickets with their names and designator codes on Mexican-operated flights following the renewal of Mexico's top safety rating, the FAA states. The FAA downgraded Mexico's safety rating in May 2021 to Category 2 after it determined the country did not meet standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization. The agency states that it "sent a team of aviation safety experts multiple times over the last two years" to assist with safety reviews and steps to address safety shortcomings. Areas of safety concern for the FAA included a relative lack of qualified aviation inspectors and technical personnel in Mexico compared with ICAO standards, along with the safety oversight framework at Mexico's Agencia Federal de Aviacion Civil (AFAC) regulator. Mexico had previously been downgraded by the FAA to Category 2 in 2010 but the agency restored it to Category 1 that same year.

US carriers should be careful not to compromise on safety in the name of reducing costs amid network cancellations and delays, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said on 12 September during a panel discussion at the US Chamber of Commerce Global Aerospace Summit in Washington, DC. When asked at the event about pressure that carriers face to reimburse customers after cancellations and delays, Kirby said that increasing industry requirements for compensation could have the unintended consequence of tempting airline staff to take safety risks to avoid schedule disruptions. "I do not want a pilot, I do not want a mechanic thinking about the extra cost of a delay," Kirby says. "We want them 100% focused on safety." Raising federal rules for passenger compensation could pose a greater financial liability for low-cost or regional carriers, he says, compared with US majors. Shortages of air traffic controllers employed by the US Federal Aviation Administration have been among the factors contributing to more disruptions and delays for US carriers. That makes it harder for carriers to maintain schedules when responding to severe weather and other incidents, Kirby says, particular in the New York and Newark regions. Being transparent with customers and keeping them informed about disruptions due to maintenance, weather or other factors, he says, is one way that carriers could improve responses to this trend. United reduced its schedule of summer flights connecting with Ronald Reagan Washington National airport and New York area airports in an effort to ease congestion due to a lack of air traffic controllers. A cautionary tale for US aviation safety, Kirby says, is the Boeing merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997 that shifted the combined company "from a great engineering culture to a cost-focused culture". That culture shift, he says, contributed to its failures during the aircraft safety certification of 737 Max aircraft and the resulting two fatal crashes of Max aircraft in 2018 and 2019. Boeing chief executive David Calhoun, Kirby says, "deserves a lot of credit" for reforming the airframer's safety culture in the wake of Max crashes and congressional inquiry that led to new aircraft certification laws. While hiring and retaining pilots to support capacity growth and to offset retirements is "probably a forever problem" for US airlines, Kirby says, he would not take a position on a proposal being debated in Congress about whether to raise the legally required pilot retirement age from 65 to 67. Nonetheless, he said: "We need policy changes if you are really going to address the pilot shortage". United is better positioned to meet pilot staffing needs compared with smaller regional carriers, he adds, so the US major is "not flying to as many small cities as a result". With that challenge in mind, the Regional Airline Association trade group states that proposed legislation to raise the pilot retirement age is "aimed at mitigating the growing pilot shortage and even more acute shortage of airline captains, which have driven a collapse in small community air service across the United States". Airline worker unions, including the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) and the Air Line Pilots Association, have opposed raising the retirement age, in part because it conflicts with the mandatory age of 65 set by the International Civil Aviation Organization. The US House of Representatives in July passed legislation to set funding and priorities for the FAA for the next five years, which included a provision to raise the pilot retirement age to 67. That pilot age debate and proposed new rules for airline passenger compensation are contentious issues faced by lawmakers as a Senate committee must now advance its version of that bill for approval by that chamber. The current FAA legislation enacted in 2018 expires on 30 September.