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NATS suffers a breakdown – UK Aviation Network impacted

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It’s been a bit of a bad day if you’ve attempted to travel from, to, or over the UK today, as the NATS – who provide air traffic control and flow services  – today experienced an outage with some of their systems.

a plane on the runway

A technical issue with the flight planning tools used that occurred this morning forced the cancellation and slowing of aircraft to airports in the United Kingdom, with flights cancelled and delayed. The tools impacted were the automated tools that deal with flight plans, which resulted in flow control being applied so that some flights could be processed – but not the full intended plan od the day.

In a statement, a NATS spokesperson said:

We have identified and remedied the technical issue affecting our flight planning system this morning.  We are now working closely with airlines and airports to manage the flights affected as efficiently as possible.  Our engineers will be carefully monitoring the system’s performance as we return to normal operations.

The flight planning issue affected the system’s ability to automatically process flight plans, meaning that flight plans had to be processed manually which cannot be done at the same volume, hence the requirement for traffic flow restrictions.  Our priority is always to ensure that every flight in the UK remains safe and we are sincerely sorry for the disruption this is causing. Please contact your airline for information on how this may affect your flight.

This isn’t the end of it, however.

There is going to be a tremendous knock-on effect, with airlines and airports having to adjust services, as well as planes and persons being out of position, with FlightRadar24 noting the usual flow at 14:30 local time today – with 415 flights in the air, compared to the usual 900.

Airlines and Airports have been out giving general information as the situation progressed. A lot of the tweets were captured around 17:15 local time:

British Airways is resuming its operations, however, the short-haul programme is at risk, with cancellations made

Jet2

Ryanair in its usual calm restrained self issued the following:

easyJet

East Midlands Airprt

Newcastle Airport

Heathrow Airport

Manchester Airport

Check your passenger rights

If you’re impacted, you might be able to claim your passenger rights. The UK CAA has produced a useful tweet to help you out:

This is also a good time to check alternative plans that you have that may help you – especially if your airline has cancelled your flights and you are planning what to do next.

But please, don’t take it out on the people on the ground.

This bit is important – there’s nothing that the airports, airlines or the people on the ground could have done to prevent this – it’s at a system level way beyond them, with the service provider having the technical mess up

It’s going to be frustrating as airline and airport planners attempt to steer the timetables back on schedule and to help get people from A to Z, with cancellations and delays for a lot of people.

But please, don’t be angry at them. Don’t take your anger and frustration out on those front-line workers, who want to get you to where you need to go. 

It’s going to take more than a few hours for things to settle down and for normality to resume.

And it is going to require patience as things settle back down.

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