French air traffic control failure causes major flight delays

An IT system outage at French air navigation service provider DSNA on Sunday caused major delays at airports in France and neighboring countries. The computer crash caused delays of 30 min. to an hour-and-a-half at French airports. The failure, deemed “exceptional” by French civil aviation authority DGAC, added to problems in a region where flight punctuality is a challenge. The outage started Sept. 1 at 2:30 a.m. local time. It affected the DSNA’s aeronautical message switch system, which exchanges flight plan and takeoff slot data between Eurocontrol’s and DSNA’s initial flight plan processing systems (IFPS), DSNA director of operations Eric Bruneau said. The first backup scheme did not work and DSNA resorted to a spare arrangement. By 9:00 a.m., it was operational, and by 11:30 a.m. the IFPS database was rebuilt, according to Bruneau. In the meantime, however, air traffic controllers had to manually enter flight plans. The extra workload meant that each controller could take care of fewer aircraft than usual. At the worst time in the morning, ATC capacity was down by 30%-50%, Bruneau said. Not every airport felt the full impact of the outage, as the capacity reduction did not necessarily happen at peak times, depending on the airport.<br/>