Simon Calder: What is causing the air traffic control chaos? The authorities have some explaining to do
The air-traffic control provider has some explaining to do. Very soon
Aliver
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It’s the £80m question: Why are airlines facing enormous financial losses while their passengers endure extreme distress?
The last week of August is a time of high demand for air travel, especially from returning holidaymakers. Because of the UK’s limited airport infrastructure, especially in southeast England, there is precious little slack in the system: Heathrow and Gatwick are, respectively, the busiest two-runway and single-runway airports in the world.
So the UK’s normally well-regarded air traffic control (ATC) system needed to be working perfectly on bank holiday Monday.
At 11.24am on Monday I began to get reports from airlines of an “ATC failure affecting entire UK airspace”. Within 15 minutes I asked Nats, the national air-traffic service, what was happening.
Just before noon, the company told me: “We are currently experiencing a technical issue and have applied traffic flow restrictions to maintain safety. Engineers are working to find and the fix the fault.
“We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.”
That last line raises the bar for official understatement. The entire UK aviation industry could see the only possible consequence was severe disruption. And so it proved, with almost 1,600 UK-touching flights cancelled on Monday and an estimated quarter-million passengers waking on Tuesday somewhere they did not want or expect to be.
On Monday evening I asked Nats a dozen questions, which I shall share with you.
The organisation replied at lunchtime on Tuesday, declining to answer those questions: a thorough investigation is under way to understand the root cause of what happened, and the world will have to wait until that is known.
Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Europe’s biggest budget airline, Ryanair, had no more luck than me. In a video message, he said: “It’s not acceptable that UK Nats simply allow their computer systems to be taken down, and everybody’s flights get cancelled or delayed.”
With an information vacuum, here comes some speculation.
Foul up is far more likely than foul play in these circumstances, so I shall pin the blame on some weakness in the monumentally complex Nats computer system.
Several sources have told me that a French airline filed a dodgy flight plan that made no digital sense. The Nats system should automatically have identified an anomaly and spat out the plan, saying “try again”.
Yet instead, the flight plan was ingested and set in train a shutdown of the entire system. The closest analogy I can come up with is a spanner being thrown into an extremely well-tuned machine – let’s say an aircraft engine – and shutting the whole thing down. The big question Nats has to answer is: why wasn’t there protection against said spanner, and what is being done to avoid a repeat?
Safety was never an issue: UK air-traffic control has a well-deserved reputation for superb professionalism. But with so much emotional and financial cost being paid by passengers and airlines, the air-traffic control provider has some explaining to do. Very soon.
During times of travel chaos, The Independent’s travel correspondant Simon Calder is here to provide unparalleled advice to holidaymakers. You can sign up to Simon’s newsletter by clicking here. Subscribers to Independent Premium can also receive a weekly Ask Me Anything email from Simon which sees him answer your burning travel questions. You can sign up to Independent Premium by clicking here.
