UK's Air Traffic Control crash was caused by 'unusual piece of data', top boss reveals
The UK’s air traffic control issue was caused by an “unusual piece of data”, a top boss has revealed.
National Air Traffic Services (NATS) chief executive Martin Rolfe said that the failure on Monday, of which the fallout is still being felt, said the failure was caused by the rogue fragment of data. This was described as “staggering” that it could cause such a collapse by one expert, affecting hundreds of thousands of passengers with the fallout warned to last up to two weeks.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Rolfe said: “It wasn’t an entire system failure. It was a piece of the system, an important piece of the system. But in those circumstances, if we receive an unusual piece of data that we don’t recognise, it is critically important that that information – which could be erroneous – is not passed to air traffic controllers.”
Passengers at Heathrow Airport today as Brits still grapple with the fallout from the 'technical error' (PA)When asked why the flight data that caused the widespread cancellations wasn’t rejected by the system, he continued: “Our systems are safety-critical systems, they are dealing with the lives of passengers and the travelling public. So even things like just throwing data away needs to be very carefully considered.
“If you throw away a critical piece of data you may end up in the next 30 seconds, a minute or an hour with something that then is not right on the screens in front of the controller. So it is nothing like throwing away spam.”
Eight remote and beautiful but brutal jobs if you want to leave it all behind
Willie Walsh, director-general of global airline body the International Air Transport Association (Iata), said it was “staggering” that the collapse could be caused in such a way. Speaking to the same programme, he said: “I find it staggering, I really do. This system should be designed to reject data that’s incorrect, not to collapse the system.
“If that is true, it demonstrates a considerable weakness that must have been there for some time and I’m amazed if that is the cause of this. Clearly we’ll wait for the full evaluation of the problem but that explanation doesn’t stand up from what I know of the system.”
Mr Walsh estimated that, across the industry, the air traffic chaos would create “£100 million of additional costs”. He said it wasn’t fair that the air traffic control system, which was at the heart of the failure, won’t pay up at all.
He added: “There’s a great opportunity for the UK post-Brexit to look at the way passenger compensation is dealt with to ensure that the people who are responsible for the delays and cancellations ultimately bear the costs.”
On Monday morning, it emerged that the air traffic control services across the UK had ran into a serious issue. It later emerged that the problem meant flight paths couldn’t be automatically logged, so they had to be manually inputted.
This led to almost 1,600 flights cancelled, and this also meant planes and crews were often left in the wrong place, worsening the knock on effect as airlines and airports scramble now to get customers home.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
