Flight chaos at UK airports after computer failure
Source: Kounteya Sinha
Passengers in UK faced major chaos due to widespread cancellation and delay to their flights on Saturday after a computer failure at UK's air traffic control centre on Friday night.
Dozens of flights to and from Heathrow were cancelled after the major power failure shut down all operating systems.
A problem at the NATS air-traffic control centre at Swanwick in Hampshire led to a sharp reduction in the "flow rate" causing diversions, delays and about 100 cancellations, mostly to and from Heathrow.
Flights from Gatwick airport and London City were also hit due to the power failure. British Airways cancelled 33 flights, both flying in or out of Heathrow airport. Virgin Atlantic flights too were cancelled. Gatwick saw Easy jet flights from Amsterdam and Copenhagen cancelled.
Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin said the disruption was unacceptable."Any disruption to our aviation system is a matter of the utmost concern, especially at this time of year in the run up to the holiday season. Disruption on this scale is simply unacceptable and I have asked NATS for a full explanation of this evening's incident. I also want to know what steps will be taken to prevent this happening again," he added.
UK air traffic controllers NATS said "Swanwick controller workstations provide a number of tools and services to the controller to enable them to safely control a high volume of air traffic. In normal operations the number of workstations in use versus in standby fluctuates with the demands of the traffic being controlled. In this instance a transition between the two states caused a failure in the system which has not been seen before. The failure meant that the controllers were unable to access all of the data regarding individual flight plans which significantly increases their workload".
"Our priority is to maintain a safe operation for the flying public; consequently when the failure occurred we immediately took steps to reduce the traffic into and out of the UK network. The controllers had a full radar picture and full communications with all aircraft at all times during the incident and at no time was safety compromised in any way.We apologize again for the inconvenience caused".
NATS added "It will take time for operations across the UK to fully recover so passengers should contact their airline for the status of their flight".
In a bizarre incident, the airspace over London was completely shut down for over four hours after a massive computer failure.
Eurocontrol confirmed that London airspace has been closed until 19:00 GMT on Friday evening (12.30am India time on Saturday) after a computer failure.
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