Simon Calder: The man who pays his way

Air traffic control needs Sellotape and string again

Incentivisation: six syllables that, according to Michael O'Leary, should make air travel easier. Mr O'Leary is the chief executive of Ireland's biggest airline, Ryanair. Like almost everyone involved with flying to or from Britain, whether as travellers or workers, he is fed up with lengthy delays caused by Britain's phenomenally expensive air traffic control system. He suggests an incentive to persuade National Air Traffic Services (Nats) to live up to its name: handing air fares back to afflicted travellers.

The sorry story so far: Nats is the public-private partnership now responsible for the £620m air traffic control system that arrived six years late. The New En-Route Centre at Swanwick in Hampshire finally opened in January. this year. "The world's most advanced air traffic control centre", Nats calls it. Yet it has demonstrated all the operational robustness and user-friendliness of a Sinclair ZX81 (younger readers may not be familiar with this antiquated and temperamental prototype personal computer, whose components were closely related to Sellotape and string).

After three failures in two months, Nats' response involves leafing through the Byers Bumper Book of Excuses to blame the complexities of these new-fangled computers: "In any new, sophisticated, computer-based system you occasionally have problems," says Richard Everitt, chief executive of Nats.

The former Sellotape and string arrangement at West Drayton that kept the skies safe for three decades broke down only every couple of years or so. If its replacement was not ready, why was it introduced? If Nats had spent as much on debugging the network as on landscaping the grounds, the computer system might not collapse every time an engineer shines a torch on it.

Maddening for travellers, and for Michael O'Leary. His airline is not noted for excessive generosity in the event of flight disruptions. But Ryanair makes money by flying people around Europe, not by having its planes and passengers grounded by yet another air traffic control foul-up. "Nats is now a private-sector company, and it should provide compensation to its customers." This, Mr O'Leary argues, will incentivise the air traffic control service. The next time that his Boeing 737s are denied permission to take off, the theory goes, Nats' management will need to do more than shake its corporate head in befuddlement.

Fat chance. One reason is that Mr O'Leary's letter was addressed to Stephen Byers, and has no doubt been binned by the Secretary of State for Transport's replacement, Alistair Darling. More seriously, the people who run our air traffic control "service" know full well that the organisation possesses the most natural monopoly in Britain.

Railtrack occasionally comes close to shutting down the national rail network, aggravating millions of travellers, without the country collapsing. But Britain simply has to have air traffic control – for reasons of national security as well as prestige. Nats is therefore immune to the sorts of financial pressures that keep business leaders awake at night. When the bank calls, the directors simply tap whoever is this week's Secretary of State for Transport for another handout.

Yet there is a place for incentivising private-sector travel companies. The best example is set by easyJet, which incentivises itself to keep delays to a minimum: fares are refunded to passengers delayed by four hours or more. Ryanair now needs to follow suit, and hand back cash when it fails to deliver baggage on the same day that the flight arrives.

The cameras of the television docu-soap Airline were at the wrong cut-price airport on Monday evening. Had they spent some hours at Stansted rather than Luton, they would have witnessed tears, tantrums and trolley rage as thousands of Ryanair passengers found themselves stuck for hours in the facility-free no man's land known as the arrivals hall. The weary travellers were told that staff shortages meant that there would be long waits for luggage – up to two hours for some passengers, causing them to miss flight connections and the last train to London.

Baggage handlers are the forgotten heroes of aviation. Their efforts in loading the right bags on the right planes are ignored until things go wrong. Ryanair, Stansted's biggest airline, does not employ its own handlers; it uses a contractor called Groundstar. "Staff shortages" were blamed for the fact that it took longer to move luggage 640 yards from the aircraft to the carousel than to fly 640 miles from Salzburg to Stansted.

So whose fault is it? According to Groundstar: "There are too many bags going through the system. It's the system that is at fault." Stansted and Ryanair, says the handling company, "are victims of their own success".

The airport disagrees: "In the main it is only the Ryanair contract operation handled by Groundstar which has experienced problems with lengthy baggage delivery times. We are confident that the infrastructure is adequate to deal with passenger volumes."

Ryanair, meanwhile, blames a broken baggage belt for the delays, and says Groundstar is employing extra staff to avoid a backlog.

The apparent inability of these three entities to sing from the same song sheet bodes ill for this holiday weekend, when a quarter of a million people are expected to pass through the UK's fastest-growing airport. Surely someone – the airline, the handlers or the airport – needs to be incentivised, or we travellers will incentivise ourselves by flying with different airlines using other handlers from alternative airports.

I vowed not to mention the Stansted Express from the Essex airport into London, but this week one of the train company's cheery staff bellowed "No bikes on here. Get on that one", pointing across the platform at a slow(er) train. The rail link therefore sneaks in on a technicality as my folding cycle's latest contretemps with Europe's railway staff.

Now we're aboard, it is worth noting that the company has abandoned its "under 45 minutes" promise for the journey between Stansted airport and Liverpool Street station. In the summer timetable, which begins tomorrow, some trains are scheduled to take 55 minutes.

Still, the timetable is better than that from our old friend Teesside airport in north-east England. Miss the 10.25am departure from the airport on a Saturday – perhaps because of a luggage delay from a Ryanair flight from Dublin – and you must wait a week for the next train.

"One of the world's most-admired transportation companies" – that is how Aer Lingus describes itself. Its first flight, from Dublin to Bristol, took off 66 years ago this week (inset left shows a ticket from the flight). By all accounts the pioneering passengers – and their luggage – arrived in sprightly fashion. But after Thursday's strike by pilots, the Irish national airline say it is "unable to resume normal operations" in the next few days. Some say it may close permanently.

In the tough new world of 21st-century aviation, it is difficult for a small national carrier to offer a mix of domestic, European and intercontinental flights. Aer Lingus will survive in some form, possibly only as a feeder service for American Airlines and British Airways. To find out if this is the Irish airline's view of the future, yesterday I checked out its mission statement on the internet. It said: "This page is currently being updated."

Ryanair, meanwhile, is cashing in on its rival's problems by laying on an extra flight between London and Dublin "which will enable 190 extra passengers to travel the route each way". The capacity of Ryanair's biggest aircraft is 189. Who gets to travel in the hold, and when can they expect to get home?