UK flight chaos made worse by engineer delay, report finds
Air traffic chaos over last year's August bank holiday was made worse by on-call engineers being unable to fix the issue from home, a report has said. More than 700,000 passengers were affected by an air traffic meltdown that had knock-on effects for days. Industry group Airlines UK said the report, compiled for the Civil Aviation Authority, showed air traffic control processes were "wholly inadequate". Air traffic provider NATS said it had made "improvements" since last summer. Airlines have said the delays cost them tens of millions of pounds. On 28 August last year, a busy bank holiday Monday, there was a major technical failure at NATS which led to widespread flight disruption that left thousands of passengers stranded. An independent interim report into what went wrong, which was commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority, found the problem started when the NATS system struggled to cope with an unusual flight plan and shut down. A backup system also shut down, leaving manual processing of flight plans as the only option. NATS engineers working on site could not fix the issue, so the problem was escalated to on-call engineers higher up the chain. It took one of the senior engineers an hour and a half to get to the NATS site and try to perform a system restart, which was not possible remotely. That specialist engineer did not get there until more than three hours into the incident. Help was then sought from another engineer, and system manufacturer Frequentis was called after four hours, when stored flight plan data had run out. The system was down for close to six-and-three-quarter hours. About three quarters of a million passengers were affected by the incident - which caused widespread cancellations on a bank holiday Monday - with "considerable financial and emotional consequences", the report said. That includes 300,000 people hit by cancellations, 95,000 by long delays of more than three hours, and a further 300,000 by shorter delays. Story has more.<br/>
https://portal.staralliance.com/cms/news/hot-topics/2024-03-15/general/uk-flight-chaos-made-worse-by-engineer-delay-report-finds
https://portal.staralliance.com/cms/logo.png
UK flight chaos made worse by engineer delay, report finds
Air traffic chaos over last year's August bank holiday was made worse by on-call engineers being unable to fix the issue from home, a report has said. More than 700,000 passengers were affected by an air traffic meltdown that had knock-on effects for days. Industry group Airlines UK said the report, compiled for the Civil Aviation Authority, showed air traffic control processes were "wholly inadequate". Air traffic provider NATS said it had made "improvements" since last summer. Airlines have said the delays cost them tens of millions of pounds. On 28 August last year, a busy bank holiday Monday, there was a major technical failure at NATS which led to widespread flight disruption that left thousands of passengers stranded. An independent interim report into what went wrong, which was commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority, found the problem started when the NATS system struggled to cope with an unusual flight plan and shut down. A backup system also shut down, leaving manual processing of flight plans as the only option. NATS engineers working on site could not fix the issue, so the problem was escalated to on-call engineers higher up the chain. It took one of the senior engineers an hour and a half to get to the NATS site and try to perform a system restart, which was not possible remotely. That specialist engineer did not get there until more than three hours into the incident. Help was then sought from another engineer, and system manufacturer Frequentis was called after four hours, when stored flight plan data had run out. The system was down for close to six-and-three-quarter hours. About three quarters of a million passengers were affected by the incident - which caused widespread cancellations on a bank holiday Monday - with "considerable financial and emotional consequences", the report said. That includes 300,000 people hit by cancellations, 95,000 by long delays of more than three hours, and a further 300,000 by shorter delays. Story has more.<br/>
