The day teleworking caused air chaos in the United Kingdom that affected 700,000 people

On August 28, 2023, the United Kingdom’s air traffic control system failed, in the middle of summer and also a holiday in the country. The national air traffic services were not able to process the flight plan data for a flight from Los Angeles to Paris and that unleashed a chaos which ended up affecting more than 700,000 people whose flights had to be cancelled. The problem could have been less if the engineers in charge of the manual system had not been teleworking that day.

An independent report led by former consumer industries executive Jeff Halliwell, which this Thursday includes the Financial Times, points out that the downtime lasted longer than it would have lasted if there had been any workers in the office. Specifically, he indicates that one of the engineers It took 90 minutes to arrive and manually reboot the system and that his superior was not notified until more than three hours after the problem began. Additionally, Nats (the public-private partnership that runs UK air traffic services) waited four hours to call the company that built the software.

The airlines asked Nats for compensation to cover the losses they incurred that day, one of the busiest of the year. Now, with this report, the AirlinesUK lobby highlights that there is “irrefutable evidence that the Nats’ basic resilience planning and procedures were totally inadequate.” And the air traffic manager assured after the chaos that the engineers had been at their jobs throughout the interruption and described the breakdown as “an event that occurs every 15 minutes”in that case caused by a flight plan that included two waypoint markers (those that tell controllers the flight path and avoid mid-air collisions) with identical but separate names.

The new report exposes “a significant lack of advance planning” in the event of a major disruption and “concern” about the aviation industry drilling or training for similar potential errors.

Days to find a solution for passengers

Of the almost 700,000 affected, the Civil Aviation Authority – the UK regulator – estimates that more than 300,000 passengers were affected by flight cancellations, around 95,000 by delays of more than three hours and at least another 300,000 by shorter delays. .

The attention to passengers by some airlines also left much to be desired, according to the report. The criticism here focuses on the “surprise” that “an air traffic control problem that was solved in seven hours caused so many cancellations and delays with knock-on effects for so longIn some, passengers were offered very little assistance and “were made to wait several days before finding a flight home.”

The text also questions the adequacy of the regulatory structure that underpins Nats’ performance objectives as it finds it “inappropriate that it is likely to suffer very few financial consequences, having caused such an enormous and serious disruption.” We will have to wait for the final report that Halliwell will publish at the end of the year to investigate this aspect further.