Aviation and airlines ( commonwealth union ) _ It has come to light that a French airline may have submitted a flight plan erroneously, which may have caused the air traffic control meltdown, leaving affected passengers at risk of being detained abroad for up to a week.
Flight cancellations have already affected about 300,000 airline passengers since the Nats system went down on bank holiday Monday for many hours. As under-pressure airlines work to clear the backlog during a week when millions of people are already returning to the UK from their summer vacations, the ripple effect is expected to endure for a number of more days.
According to some sources, the problem may have been brought on by a French airline filing a shady flight plan that made no sense digitally. The Nats system was shut down as a result of the error rather than being corrected, which begged the question of how a simple typo could result in such chaos.
In a statement released late on Tuesday, Martin Rolfe, the chief executive of Nats, appeared to confirm the input issue, saying: Initial investigations into the problem show it relates to some of the flight data we received.
In response to the event, which resulted in the cancellation of more than a quarter of flights at UK airports on Monday, Downing Street has commissioned an independent assessment.
Experts had established that it was a technical issue, not a cybersecurity incident, the speaker continued. The primary and backup Nats systems, according to Mr. Rolfe’s statement responded to the inaccurate flight data by suspending automatic processing to ensure that no inaccurate safety-related information could be presented to an air traffic controller or have an impact on the rest of the air traffic system.
Some travellers who were left stuck due to the shutdown told The Independent that they had only been given options for flights within a week, with one pair being placed on a journey that doesn’t leave Portugal until the following Monday.
According to the aviation analytics company Cirium, 790 planes that were scheduled to leave from UK airports on Monday were cancelled, along with 785 arrivals. The numbers correspond to 27% of all operations. The most cancellations occurred at Heathrow, then at Gatwick and Manchester.
