| All outbound UK flights hit by air traffic control 'technical issue' 30 Jul 2025 Posted by Chris from Nailsea at 16:57, 30th July 2025 |     |
| Re: All outbound UK flights hit by air traffic control 'technical issue' 30 Jul 2025 Posted by Chris from Nailsea at 18:03, 31st July 2025 | |
An update, from the BBC:
Why did the air traffic control outage cause so much havoc?
An outage in the UK's air traffic control system caused chaos at airports in the UK and beyond on Wednesday.
The fault lasted a mere 20 minutes, but was enough to ground planes across the country, causing 150 flight cancellations and delays that have continued into Thursday.
So, what went wrong with this vital piece of air traffic technology?
NATS, which is partly owned by the government, manages all of the UK's airspace for flights arriving and departing the country's airports. It has said Wednesday's problem was caused by a "radar-related issue" - understood to be problems with the radar display system in its national air traffic control centre in Swanwick.
NATS said the issue was "resolved by quickly switching to the back-up system". However, it said the problem was different to issues that the centre faced in August 2023. Back then, more than 700,000 passengers were affected when some 500 flights were cancelled due to a major outage.
NATS said it reduced traffic during Wednesday's outage for safety reasons and added there was "no evidence" that it was caused by any cyber attack.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said NATS told her it was "an isolated event and there is no evidence of malign activity".
NATS is working on an internal investigation into what happened, but there will be no formal report to the Department for Transport.
To understand how such a brief radar failure could cause such much havoc, Graham Lake, a former director general of the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation (CANSO), said people should imagine the NATS air traffic network as "national infrastructure".
"Think of the network as motorways in the sky," he told the BBC. "When you lose something like surveillance radar coverage for whatever reason, the capability of your network degrades to a country lane. That's why the systems slow down when there's a technical failure."
(BBC news article continues)
An outage in the UK's air traffic control system caused chaos at airports in the UK and beyond on Wednesday.
The fault lasted a mere 20 minutes, but was enough to ground planes across the country, causing 150 flight cancellations and delays that have continued into Thursday.
So, what went wrong with this vital piece of air traffic technology?
NATS, which is partly owned by the government, manages all of the UK's airspace for flights arriving and departing the country's airports. It has said Wednesday's problem was caused by a "radar-related issue" - understood to be problems with the radar display system in its national air traffic control centre in Swanwick.
NATS said the issue was "resolved by quickly switching to the back-up system". However, it said the problem was different to issues that the centre faced in August 2023. Back then, more than 700,000 passengers were affected when some 500 flights were cancelled due to a major outage.
NATS said it reduced traffic during Wednesday's outage for safety reasons and added there was "no evidence" that it was caused by any cyber attack.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said NATS told her it was "an isolated event and there is no evidence of malign activity".
NATS is working on an internal investigation into what happened, but there will be no formal report to the Department for Transport.
To understand how such a brief radar failure could cause such much havoc, Graham Lake, a former director general of the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation (CANSO), said people should imagine the NATS air traffic network as "national infrastructure".
"Think of the network as motorways in the sky," he told the BBC. "When you lose something like surveillance radar coverage for whatever reason, the capability of your network degrades to a country lane. That's why the systems slow down when there's a technical failure."
(BBC news article continues)
