Military aircraft blamed for UK air traffic meltdown

2,000 FLIGHTS GROUNDED

Britain's air traffic control meltdown that grounded thousands of flights and left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded may have been triggered by a military aircraft, according to a new report.

More than 2,000 flights were cancelled on Tuesday after the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) system shut down for around four hours, causing chaos across Britain's airports and leaving passengers stuck on aircraft for hours.

Now, according to the Financial Times, four people briefed on the incident claim the crisis began when a flight plan submitted by a UK military aircraft entered “spurious” data into the Nats system.

The data allegedly caused the flight-processing system to crash, leaving Nats struggling to restore normal operations for several hours.

THE BIG QUESTION

If the report is correct, the incident raises some very uncomfortable questions about the resilience of Britain's air traffic control system.

Particularly because Nats apparently did not have a dedicated backup for the affected flight-processing system.

According to the FT, Nats operations officer Kathryn Leahy told airport and airline managers that the system was in the middle of a “complete overhaul” and that maintaining duplicated data would cost “vast amounts”.

For airlines and passengers caught in the chaos, that explanation is unlikely to be very comforting.

NO BACKUP?

The outage comes just three years after another major Nats failure in August 2023, when a technical problem delayed almost 1,600 flights.

Following that incident, the Civil Aviation Authority issued 34 recommendations aimed at preventing another major breakdown.

Nats said all 34 had been fully implemented.

Yet here Britain is again — with another catastrophic failure bringing huge sections of the country's air traffic network to a standstill.

O'LEARY WANTS HEADS TO ROLL

The pressure is now mounting on Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe.

Transport secretary Heidi Alexander summoned Rolfe to a meeting and has given him a week to report on the cause of the shutdown, while an independent CAA review has also been ordered.

But Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary isn't waiting for another report.

O'Leary accused Rolfe of “telling lies to save his own skin” and said his position was “untenable”.

“We don’t need more investigations, we don’t need more reports,” O'Leary said, arguing that passengers and airlines need a reliable backup system rather than another round of promises.

MILITARY DENIES WRONGDOING

The Ministry of Defence has rejected any suggestion that the military was at fault.

An MoD spokesperson said there was “no indication of an error on the part of the military”, while stressing that the Nats investigation is still under way.

That leaves a crucial question hanging over the entire affair.

Was a military flight plan really capable of bringing Britain's civilian air traffic control system crashing down?

And if it was, why wasn't there a robust backup capable of keeping the country's airports operating?

PASSENGERS PAY THE PRICE

While officials investigate, it is passengers who have been left to pick up the pieces.

Aircraft packed with passengers were left waiting for information for more than four hours, while some flights heading for Britain were diverted to other airports, including destinations in Germany.

And despite the enormous disruption, many affected passengers are unlikely to receive compensation because the delays are being treated as resulting from “extraordinary circumstances”.

For travellers, that may be the most galling part of all.

Thousands of flights cancelled.

Hundreds of thousands of passengers affected.

And now a report suggesting that one “spurious” piece of flight data may have helped bring the system to its knees.

SOURCE