Hundreds of thousands of travelers were left stranded with mass cancellations and delays across the UK network last week which was caused by a technical breakdown in the UK’s air traffic control system.
Airlines are demanding that they be reimbursed for the cost of the August bank holiday air traffic control (ATC) failure.
Industry body Airlines UK said its members should not have to carry the can every time there was a disruption of this magnitude.
National Air Traffic Services (Nats) said that a technical glitch on 28th August prevented it from automatically processing flight plans, triggering widespread disruption.
Over a quarter of flights to and from UK airports were cancelled that day, affecting around 250,000 people. Cancellations continued for two more days as planes and crews were out of position.
Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe said one of the systems failed after it did not process (a) flight plan properly. He added that the plan submitted by the airline (which has not been named) was “not faulty”.
Nats did not identify the route of a flight plan which led to the chaos in a preliminary report shared with Transport Secretary Mark Harper, but said the aircraft was scheduled to enter UK airspace during an 11-hour journey.
Airlines’ flight plans feature waypoints, that represent locations and are identified by a combination of letters and numbers.
Prior to being passed on to Nats the flight plan which caused last week’s disruption was submitted to Eurocontrol, which oversees ATC across Europe.
The process led to the plan featuring two waypoints around 4,000 nautical miles apart but they had identical names, which meant that Nats’ software was unable to extract a valid UK portion of the flight plan and reacted by shutting down. A back-up system that followed the same steps also stopped working.
Tim Alderslade, Airlines UK chief executive said that Airlines worked round the clock in response to the situation, putting on more flights to bring passengers home as quickly as possible and providing them with accommodation, at huge cost to all carriers impacted. He stated that Airlines could not be the insurer of last resort and that there should be accountability from Nats when things go wrong.
He said that Airlines were seeking clarity on what options exist for Nats to cover their costs under the current legislation and will continue to engage with Government on all options for redress.
Global airline body the International Air Transport Association (Iata) estimated the cost to airlines was nearly £100 million due to the requirement to provide affected passengers with alternative flights, food and drinks, and hotel accommodation.
Asked about the odds of the failure happening, Mr Rolfe said they know it is at least one in 15 million, as they have had 15 million flight plans through this system and “we can be absolutely certain that we’ve never seen this set of circumstances before.”
Nats said an “operating instruction” had been put in place to permit the “prompt recovery” of the system in the event there was a repeat of those circumstances.
A “permanent software change” is expected to be implemented in the coming days to prevent it shutting down in such an event.
Mr Rolfe added he was very confident that the changes they were making would prevent this incident from ever taking place again.
NATS, the United Kingdom’s main air traffic control organisation, has revealed its findings into the technical glitch that shut down its systems.
The report, handed over to the Department for Transport and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), found that an issue with the flight plan processing sub-system, the Flight Plan Reception Suite Automated-Replacement (FPRSA-R), had been responsible for the system entering a fail-safe mode.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced that it would launch an independent review into the meltdown.
Details of this review will be published by the end of September and the inquiry is expected to take around three months.
