Military aircraft responsible for shutting down Britain’s skies for hours: report
Key Points
- A UK military aircraft's flight plan contained spurious data that crashed the Nats flight processing system, the FT reported
- The system has no dedicated backup and needed several restart attempts over multiple hours
- More than 2,000 flights were cancelled on Tuesday (8 September), according to Cirium
- Transport secretary Heidi Alexander gave Nats one week to report and ordered a CAA review
- Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary called for Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe to resign
A flight plan filed by a UK military aircraft contained faulty data that crashed the country’s air traffic control system on Tuesday (8 September), the Financial Times reports.
The newspaper cited four people briefed on the incident who said the entry set off a chain of failures inside the flight processing system run by National Air Traffic Services (Nats), which took several hours and multiple attempts to restart.
The system has no dedicated backup, partly because Nats is midway through a full overhaul of its technology and partly because duplicating something that large would cost a vast sum, the FT added.
The military origin of the flight plan played no particular part in what followed, according to two of the people the newspaper spoke to.
Nats confirmed the fault sat inside its flight processing system, saying its engineers were on site and working urgently to resume normal operations. The agency ruled out a cyber attack.
UK airlines have pointed blame directly at leadership failures at NATS, with Ryanair COO Neal McMahon calling for the organisation’s CEO Martin Rolfe to quit.
Ryanair said that as a result of “yet another UK ATC system failure”, more than 65,000 of its passengers experienced disruption and it was forced to cancel over 50 scheduled flights.
This ATC disruption follows just three years after another collapse of the NATS system in August 2023, since which ATC charges in the UK have increased substantially.
“How many more failures do passengers have to suffer before overpaid failure NATS CEO, Martin Rolfe, accepts responsibility for his repeated mismanagement and resigns?” McMahon said.
“Over three years after NATS’ catastrophic 2023 system meltdown, it’s clear that nothing has changed, with UK passengers once again suffering avoidable ATC delays of up to 8 hours today due a critical NATS ATC system failing.”
“The astonishing part is that NATS continues to charge airlines and passengers more each year while delivering a worse service. Following the 2023 collapse, we were told lessons would be learned. We were told ‘resilience would improve’. We were told the systems had been fixed. Yet here we are again,” he said.
“This is a pattern of repeated failure with Rolfe in charge getting paid over £1.4m in bonuses p.a. while he delivers failure after failure.”
