Aviation and Airlines (Commonwealth Union)_ hundreds of thousands of customers delayed or stranded, more than 2,000 flights cancelled, and airlines facing millions in compensation costs.
How could a problem with the UK’s air traffic control system which was repaired in less than four hours have led to such protracted commotion?
A typical big travel day was Monday because it was a bank holiday. Families flew out of UK airports to enjoy the last few days of the season, while others flew home before the majority of kids started going back to school. Early reports of delays at several airports did not raise much alarm because they occur frequently and are quickly resolved.
However, just before 12:00 BST, a tweet from the Scottish airline Loganair published on social networking platform X, formerly Twitter, hinted at a more serious issue.The airline claimed that UK air traffic control computer systems had a network-wide outage. The issue was verified by Britain’s National Air Traffic Services (Nats) in less than 30 minutes. In a statement, it claimed that it was having “technical issues” and that it was limiting aviation traffic for safety. It made no mention of how long it would take its engineers to identify and resolve the issue.
Every flight could safely land. This was not a life-or-death situation, but rather one of extreme frustration and expense. A few aircraft that were already headed back to the UK made a U-turn and landed. Others merely remained seated. After the World Athletics Championships, sports broadcaster Gabby Logan was on a flight to Budapest when she heard that the flight could be delayed for 12 hours.
A former air traffic controller explains what transpired. Nats was unable to completely describe what had gone wrong. But Michele Robson, who worked at the London Area Control Centre in Swanwick from 1992 to 2016 as an air traffic controller, air traffic supervisor, and safety manager, provided with insider knowledge of the systems. She claims that the problem with the air traffic planning system began around 08:30 BST, which is many hours before Loganair’s tweet.
Even while a backup system could have continued to function normally for a further four hours, individuals working on a fix would have been fully aware they were in a race against time and would have later discovered they had run out of time.They chose to operate manually. This indicates that the flight data was manually entered by the flight planning and ATC helpers.
Even though they routinely perform this task, Michele notes that there is now significantly more strain on them. For the air traffic controllers, switching to “manual” would have been a stressful few minutes, but it is a scenario they train for.
The Cirium aviation data company was hard at work estimating the scope of the issue. It stated that 3,049 flights were planned to leave the UK on Monday and another 3,054 were scheduled to arrive. By this time, airports and airlines were advising travellers to check the most recent flight status. However, it was still unclear how long the issue would persist.
