Air traffic shutdown sparks NATS homeworking change

Airport chaos caused by a computer shutdown has led to reduced homeworking at the UK's air traffic control service.

More than 700,000 passengers suffered cancellations and delays in August 2023.

An engineer was unable to correct the fault from home and arrived at work more than three hours after the incident began, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) previously reported.

NATS said it had rostered more engineers to work on site during busy periods.

A single flight from Los Angeles to Paris triggered the failure at 08:30 BST on Monday 28 August, the CAA previously said.

The air traffic control system was confused by a duplicate code - DVL - representing both Deauville in France and Devil's Lake in North Dakota, USA, the authority reported.

The senior engineer, who was working from home on the bank holiday, arrived at NATS headquarters in Swanwick, Hampshire, shortly before 12:00, the CAA said.

His efforts to resolve the problem on site were also unsuccessful. The system was eventually restored at 14:30 after its manufacturer, Frequentis Comsoft, found the fault.

In its final report on the incident, the CAA said NATS should have more engineers on site in the summer months.

It said the "significant cost... should be seen in the context of the overall cost to the industry and to passengers of the incident", which it put at between £75m and £100m.

In a statement, NATS said: "We would like to apologise again for the inconvenience passengers suffered because of this very unusual technical incident.

"We fixed the specific issue that caused the problem last year as our first priority and it cannot reoccur."

NATS said the system had handled 15 million flights in five years without any problem.

It added that the number of Level 2 engineers based on site had been increased throughout 2024 during "high traffic periods".

The service said: "We will study the independent review report very carefully for any recommendations we have not already addressed and will support their industry-wide recommendations."

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