The system outage, which triggered a need for tight air traffic restrictions, leading to the cancellation of hundreds of flights globally, is being investigated ahead of a report that will be delivered by NATS to the UK government next week. The outage forced the air traffic service provider employees to input individual flight plans manually.
Almost 1,600 flights were cancelled across the UK airports on Monday, and a further 300 were cancelled on Tuesday morning alone, with many more delayed for several hours.
NATS reiterated its apology to customers in a statement on Tuesday night that confirmed the disruption had been caused by flight data that had been received.
Its chief executive, Martin Rolfe, said: “Very occasionally technical issues occur that are complex and take longer to resolve. In the event of such an issue our systems are designed to isolate the problem and prioritise continued safe air traffic control.
“This is what happened yesterday. At no point was UK airspace closed, but the number of flights was significantly reduced. Initial investigations into the problem show it relates to some of the flight data we received”.
“Our systems, both primary and the backups, responded by suspending automatic processing to ensure that no incorrect safety-related information could be presented to an air traffic controller or impact the rest of the air traffic system. There are no indications that this was a cyber-attack.”
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said: “I know people will be enormously frustrated by the disruption that’s impacting them. The Transport Secretary is in constant dialogue with all the industry participants, he will be talking to airlines specifically and making sure that they support passengers to get home as quickly as possible.”
Airlines are facing costs “in the tens of millions”, according to Willie Walsh, the former chief executive of British Airways, who is now the director general of the International Air Transport Association, as disruption extended into the third day.
“I would imagine at an industry level we’ll be getting close to £100m of additional costs that airlines have encountered as a result of this failure,” Walsh told the BBC, although he cautioned it was too early to determine the eventual cost.
The chief executive of the air traffic control service NATS (formerly National Air Traffic Services), Martin Rolfe, confirmed the chaos was caused when part of the system collapsed on Monday because it “didn’t recognise a message”.
The outage led to the cancellation of about 1,100 flights to and from four UK airports – London Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Manchester – on Monday, affecting the journeys of hundreds of thousands of passengers. He said NATS had questions to answer, adding it was “staggering” that a single piece of data could have been at fault.
Airlines are not hopeful that they will be able to recoup any of their costs from NATS, fuelling the anger of airline executives who will be paying out millions to reaccommodate passengers due to flight disruption. “This is what really frustrates and angers airlines. This was completely outside the control of the airlines and yet airlines are subject to paying customers for delays, for cancellations, for looking after them, which is very considerable,” he said.
“It’s very unfair because the air traffic control system, which was at the heart of this failure, doesn’t pay a single penny.”
Rolfe apologised to affected passengers and said the company did not underestimate the impact of the outage.
“We worked absolutely as quickly as we could to make sure we could safely restore the service,” Rolfe told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“Almost all the time it handles it perfectly. In fact, this is staggering, in the sense that it is incredibly rare. And we make it our business to make sure it is incredibly rare.”
EasyJet has begun the repatriation of customers stranded by Monday’s collapse of the UK’s air traffic control system, with five flights scheduled to bring customers back to Gatwick airport, as airlines estimated the failure could cost them up to £100m. The airline said: “During this traditionally very busy week for travel, options for returning to the UK are more limited on some routes.”
Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, said: “It’s not acceptable that UK NATS simply allow their computer systems to be taken down and everybody’s flights get cancelled.”
The incident will be investigated by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). NATS has confirmed there were no signs the failure was caused by a cyber-attack.
Aviation analytics firm Cirium, said that as of 09:00 BST on Wednesday, 30 flights had been cancelled departing UK airports - about 1% of all departures. It said 34 flights had also been cancelled arriving in the UK so far. Cirium's data suggested almost 2,000 inbound and outbound flights had been cancelled since the disruption started on August 28.
After chairing a meeting between NATS, the CAA, airlines, airports, trade bodies and Border Force, Transport Secretary Mark Harper said on Tuesday that knock-on effects of the disruption were set to continue over the coming days.
This week was already set to be one of the busiest travel weeks of the year so far, airlines will be clearing the disruption from chaos over several days.
While airlines cannot compensate for an 'extraordinary circumstance' such as this ATC provider system failure, airlines do have a duty of care that they must adhere to — and that’s’ why passengers should keep receipts for food, ground transportation, hotel accommodation, etc and then send directly to the airline once a journey has been completed.
NATS has suffered before with a major outage – and a ‘bug’ present in the UK’s National Air Traffic Services IT systems since the 1990s was the root cause of a major five-hour outage of UK air traffic control back in December 2014, which caused air travel chaos in the busy month of December.
The author is an aviation analyst. Twitter handle: @AlexInAir
