Last year’s August bank holiday saw over 700,000 passengers affected by a major air traffic disruption that left thousands of passengers stranded. Independent reports suggest that on-call engineers were unable to help in fixing the problem remotely. The report, compiled for the Civil Aviation Authority, states that air traffic control processes were “wholly inadequate.” Industry body Airlines UK claims that last year’s chaos demonstrated a significant lack of pre-planning and coordination between various parts of the industry, resulting in several negative impacts.
On 28 August, a major technical failure occurred with the National Air Traffic Service (NATS) system leading to chaos that lasted for days. The problem started when the NATS system struggled to cope with an unusual flight plan, and the backup system also shut down, leaving manual processing of flight plans as the only alternative. NATS engineers working on-site could not fix the issue, which was escalated to higher-ranking on-call engineers. A senior engineer took almost an hour and a half to get to the NATS site, which was not possible to perform a system restart remotely.
The delay in fixing the issue led several airlines to claim the disruption cost them ten million pounds in lost revenue. The report indicates that improvements in resilience planning would be required to prevent a similar meltdown in the future, and there wasn’t any rehearsal of how to manage such an incident. The report describes the significant lack of pre-planning and coordination between different parts of the industry for usual “major events and incidents.”
The report also highlighted communication issues responsible for increased uncertainty regarding the incident’s severe impacts on passengers. Some passengers were provided misinformation regarding their rights and had to make their arrangements to get back home without proper guidance from airlines. While some individuals were provided with appropriate assistance, several others were left at the airport without enough hotel accommodation, food vouchers, or insufficient information regarding passenger rights.
The interim report by the Civil Aviation Authority suggests that NATS’ basic resilience planning and procedures were wholly inadequate and fell below the standard for the national infrastructure’s importance. The chief executive of Airlines UK notes that the final report would lead to recommendations to prevent a similar catastrophic failure from occurring in the future
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