An interim report, prepared by an Independent Review Panel into the air traffic control failure on 28 August 2023, has been published by the UK Civil Aviation Authority.
The outage saw the UK’s air-traffic control computer system, and its back-up, failed for several hours on the August Bank Holiday and saw over 700,000 passengers were impacted, including 300,000 people by cancellations, 95,000 by long delays of over 3 hours, and a further 300,000 by shorter delays.
The report found that the main and back-up systems flummoxed by flight plan that contained Devil’s Lake and Deauville, both coded DVL.
Meanwhile the on call Nats engineer took ninety minutes to reach HQ and reboot computer as The engineer responsible for overseeing the system “was rostered on-call and therefore was not available on site at the time of the failure”.
“This report contains damning evidence that Nats’ basic resilience planning and procedures were wholly inadequate and fell well below the standard that should be expected for national infrastructure of this importance.” said a statement from NATS
