Investigators say a “lack of planning” and engineers working from home caused chaos in air travel for more than 700,000 passengers.
hundreds of flights Canceled, thousands stranded On August 28 last year, he traveled abroad due to an air traffic control (ATC) system failure.
Monday is a bank holiday and one of the busiest days of the year for air travel.
airline Air traffic control provider National Air Traffic Services (Nats) suffered a technical glitch in processing flight plans, resulting in a loss of around £100m in refunds, rebookings, hotel rooms and refreshments.
Passengers at Heathrow Airport. Data map: PA
The report estimated that more than 300,000 people experienced flight cancellations, about 95,000 people suffered delays of more than three hours, and at least 300,000 people suffered shorter delays.
An interim report released by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) regulator on Thursday said the investigation team found “a multi-agency failure to manage an incident of this nature and scale”.
Such rehearsals are a regular feature of planning in other industries, the group said.
“There was a severe lack of pre-planning and coordination for major events and incidents,” the report said, focusing on how to correct the problems.
The report said Nats did not typically schedule planned maintenance work on public holidays, so engineering crews were often “on standby in remote locations – often at home”.
It took a Level 2 duty engineer 90 minutes to get there and perform a full system reboot, which couldn’t be done at home, but “more than three hours after the incident, there was still no call for a more senior engineer.” “. Initial failure”.
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The flight plan listed two waypoints or locations with the same abbreviation, causing the system to generate a “serious abnormal error” and shut down to “prevent obviously corrupted flight data from being transmitted to air traffic controllers,” the report said.
Many of the affected passengers had to pay up front for alternative flights, food and accommodation and submit claims to airlines, even though airlines are required by law to cover these costs.
Passengers at Heathrow Airport. Data map: PA
The financial cost to passengers is “significant”, but the panel noted that “stress and anxiety” are “at least as severe”.
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Tim Alderslade, chief executive of British Airways, which represents the UK-registered airline, said the report contained “shocking evidence that the national airline’s basic resilience planning and procedures are completely inadequate and far below.” “Standards to which critical national infrastructure should be expected.”
Some travelers were stranded overseas for days.
A spokesperson for the Nats said they are already working on improvements.
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