Tue, 19 May 2026
Hunch
Market10 Sep 2026

Does the CAA publish the scope of its Nats review by 10 October?

BinaryResolves 10 Oct 2026
Hunch68%
Your forecast
  • Yes
  • No
Resolved
Resolved: YES

On 25 September 2026 the Civil Aviation Authority published the terms of reference for its independent review of the Nats incident of 8 September, with an initial report due by the end of January 2027.

Resolved 25 Sep 2026
How this resolves

The review market resolves on the CAA's own publication at caa.co.uk of the review's scope, its terms of reference, or the appointment of whoever leads it, first-party for facts about the regulator. It resolves YES if any of those is published on or before 10 October 2026; a press comment with no published scope resolves NO. The Guardian and Sky News settle it if the CAA speaks only through the media.

The pattern behind it

7 of 7
In all seven comparable failures since 2014 the operator's chief executive or administrator was still in post 30 days later. The nearest thing to an exception is Nats itself: Richard Deakin faced calls from MPs to resign or forfeit his bonus after the December 2014 Swanwick failure, and left by mutual consent on 18 May 2015, five months later and well outside the window (Guardian, 18 May 2015). The American case ran to a similar rhythm. Billy Nolen was still acting FAA administrator when the agency blamed a contractor on 20 January 2023, and said he would leave on 21 April, 100 days after the outage (New York Times, 21 Apr 2023). Departure follows these failures, when it follows at all, on the timetable of a review rather than of a news cycle.

We looked for system failures at air traffic control operators in the UK, Europe and the US since 2014 that cancelled or delayed flights at scale. We checked whether the head of the operator was still in the job 30 days later. We found seven, and in all seven the head stayed. Three of them were at Nats itself.