Airport chaos made worse by password issue - report

An engineer's password problem hampered efforts to resolve Bank Holiday airport chaos caused by a flight data fault, a report has said. More than 700,000 passengers suffered cancellations and delays in August 2023 due to the computer shutdown at NATS, the UK's air traffic control service. The engineer was unable to reset the system from home and arrived at work more than three hours after the incident began, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said. NATS said it would review its resilience plans and had ensured the fault could not happen again. A single flight from Los Angeles to Paris triggered the failure on Monday 28 August, the CAA report confirmed. Air traffic control systems handling the flight were confused by a duplicate code - DVL - representing both Deauville in France and Devil's Lake in North Dakota, USA. The failure was detected at 08:30 BST at NATS headquarters in Swanwick, Hampshire, which contacted the engineer 30 minutes later, the report added. However, it said “the password login details of the Level 2 engineer could not be readily verified due to the architecture of the system", which was not restored until 14:30. More than 2,000 flights were cancelled on 28 and 29 August, causing "chaotic conditions" at overcrowded airports, the CAA reported. It said the total cost of the incident to passengers and air operators was between GBP75m and BP100m. In a list of recommendations, it said NATS should review its arrangements to manage significant disruption as well as its communication with airlines, remote working policies, and software.<br/>