UK air traffic control system outage linked to military aircraft
In the United Kingdom, a major outage in the air traffic control system, which led to the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights on Tuesday, may have been linked to the flight plan of a military aircraft. The Guardian reports, citing the Financial Times.
The outage lasted four hours
The UK’s National Air Traffic Services (Nats) system was down for four hours. As a result, hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected and more than 2,000 flights were cancelled.
According to the Financial Times, four sources informed about the incident said that the outage may have been caused by a flight plan submitted by a British military aircraft. According to the report, data on the flight described as erroneous were entered into the system, leading to a failure in Nats’ air traffic control systems.
As the newspaper writes, during a conversation with airport and airline managers, Nats representative Catherine Leahy said that the flight-processing system did not have a separate backup system. According to her, the service is in the process of a full systems upgrade, while duplicating a large volume of data would require significant costs.
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Investigation into the causes of the incident
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander summoned Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe to a meeting on Wednesday. She said she did not consider the incident unavoidable and, according to the newspaper, gave Rolfe a week to report on the reasons for the system shutdown. Alexander also instructed the UK Civil Aviation Authority to conduct an independent review.
This is the most serious incident in UK commercial airspace since August 2023, when a technical problem delayed nearly 1,600 flights. After that incident, the Civil Aviation Authority gave Nats 34 recommendations for improving its systems, and it was reported that all of them had been implemented.
Rolfe ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, which had initially been considered. Several airlines have already called for him to resign or be dismissed. Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary accused Rolfe of making false statements and called his remaining in office unacceptable.
Due to the delays, some aircraft with passengers waited for information for more than four hours. Flights due to arrive in the United Kingdom were diverted to other airports, and some aircraft landed in Germany. The UK Ministry of Defence said it saw no signs of an error by the military, stressing that the Nats investigation is ongoing.
