‘Technical issue’ behind NATS air traffic system leads to aviation chaos

A network-wide technical issue across the UK’s air traffic control system, lasting little more than three hours yesterday, has had a major impact on UK aviation, grounding hundreds of flights and causing severe delays.

The technical issue that compromised the National Air Traffic Service (NATS) system was first communicated on Monday 28 August just after midday and recovered just over three hours later.

During this downtime UK air traffic controllers had to enter aviation data manually, leading to long delays with many passengers stranded on grounded planes.

This morning it was reported that the technical issue had resulted in the cancellation of a quarter of all flights to and from UK airports yesterday.

Investigations into the causes of the glitch are still ongoing, but in a statement issued yesterday UK air traffic control said that it had suffered a “flight planning issue”.

“This affected the systems ability to automatically process flight plans, meaning that flight plans had to be processed manually” the NATS said.

However, while officials appear to be aware of what caused the outage, it has not been revealed how the technical issue managed to disable the entire system.

NATS ruled out a cyber attack early on, despite media reports, and is posting updates on its site as engineers work to fix the fault.

The glitch took place during one of the busiest travel periods in the UK calendar –  falling as it did on a bank holiday Monday, a few days before schools start back for the autumn term.

Though it’s now back up and running, flights yesterday were subject to cancellations and delays.

While hackers have been ruled out, some cyber experts claim that using observability tools in systems such as NATS, could help detect faults like this sooner.

Oseloka Obiora, CTO at RiverSafe, said: “Having visibility over the condition of networks, infrastructure and applications based on data outputs can ensure that IT teams are able to better identify and resolve issues faster.”

IT teams can monitor the “unknowns unknowns” he added, enabling them to be better prepared for unexpected technical issues that arise within a network, particularly those that are complex or across distributed systems.

“Effective network visibility through observability can be the difference between hours and days’ worth of delays in the aviation industry,” Obiora noted.

Earlier this month, NATS announced a seven-year partnership with telco giant BT to create a strategic network architecture to support air traffic operations in the UK.

The British telco is tasked with handling the consolidation and modernisation of NATS’ critical data network as well as managing digital networking and cyber security across its sites.

In the statement BT said that it would also develop an enhanced cyber security capability with NATS, including a new ‘proactive central coordination point for cyber resilience’.

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