Last week’s widespread flight disruption was attributed to a “one in 15 million” technical anomaly, stated the chief of air traffic control (ATC).
Martin Rolfe, the CEO of National Air Traffic Services (Nats), mentioned that a system malfunction occurred when it failed to correctly process a flight plan. He emphasized that the submitted flight plan by an unidentified airline was without errors.
Due to this issue, NATS couldn’t automatically process flight plans for several hours on August 28, a busy bank holiday Monday. This led to the cancellation of over 25% of flights on that day, impacting about 250,000 travellers. The disruptions continued for an additional two days.
When questioned about the probability of such an event, Mr. Rolfe stated, “Given that we’ve processed 15 million flight plans with this system, we’re confident in saying this specific situation was a first.”
In an initial report given to Transport Secretary Mark Harper, Nats didn’t specify the flight plan that caused the upheaval but did note that the plane was set to cross UK airspace during an 11-hour trip.
