Ryanair Group chief executive Michael O'Leary has called for aircraft to be grounded as a deliberate tool to force overdue reform of air traffic control systems, The Times reports.

O'Leary, who runs Europe's largest low-cost carrier group, argued that planned groundings — rather than the disruption-driven cancellations that have repeatedly hit European operations — are the necessary lever to fix structural failures in air traffic management.

His intervention lands amid mounting airline frustration with Europe's fragmented air traffic control network. Carriers have absorbed hundreds of thousands of delayed minutes this summer as national ATC providers struggled with staffing shortfalls, strikes and equipment outages. Ryanair itself has been among the loudest critics, pressing regulators and governments to accelerate the Single European Sky project and consolidate control of airspace.

O'Leary's proposal inverts the usual logic of airline operations. Rather than maximizing aircraft utilization — the core economic driver of the low-cost model, where Ryanair's Boeing 737 fleet typically achieves some of the highest daily rotations in the industry — he suggests that a controlled, temporary reduction in flights would create the pressure needed to force investment and reform in ATC providers.

The argument carries weight because of who is making it. Ryanair operates more aircraft than any other airline group in Europe and flies more short-haul sectors, meaning it is both the largest beneficiary of efficient ATC and the largest casualty of its failures. Every minute of ATC delay cascades across a tightly scheduled network, disrupting aircraft rotations and crew rosters across hundreds of daily flights.

Industry bodies have long complained that Europe's air traffic system, still organized along national borders rather than traffic flows, adds cost and delay that no single airline can resolve. Airlines for Europe has repeatedly tallied delay figures in the millions of minutes and called for coordinated action. O'Leary's suggestion of groundings pushes that argument to its logical conclusion: if the system cannot be fixed incrementally, capacity must be withheld until it is.

The proposal would face significant obstacles. Slot rules at capacity-constrained airports, national government control over airspace, and the political sensitivity of reducing connectivity all complicate any coordinated grounding. Regulators would also need to weigh consumer impact against the long-term reliability gains O'Leary claims.

For now, the call stands as the sharpest escalation yet in the airline industry's standoff with Europe's air navigation providers. Whether governments and the European Commission respond with structural reform — or leave carriers to absorb the cost of continued disruption — will shape European network reliability into the next summer season.