Business Reporter, BBC News
Getty imagesA radar problem used within the UK’s air traffic control system Anarchy at the airports beyond Britain and from it On Wednesday.
The mistake lasted only for 20 minutes, but was sufficient for aircraft across the country, causing cancellation and delayed 150 flights which continued on Thursday.
So, what went wrong with this important piece of air traffic technology?
NATS, which is partially owned by the government, manages all the airs in the UK for flights to reach and depart at the country’s airports.
It has not provided a lot of expansion on Wednesday’s outage, stating that “was the issue related to radar which was quickly switched to the back-up system”.
It said that it reduced traffic during the outage due to security reasons and said that “there is no evidence” that it was caused by any cyber attack.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has said that the nut told him that it was “a isolated incident and there is no evidence of fatal activity”.
In order to understand that Graham Lake, former Director General of Civil Air Navigation Services Organization (CANSO), could cause a lot of such havoc of such a brief radar, causing a lot of such havoc, said that people should imagine the Nats Air Traffic Network as a “national infrastructure”.
“Think of the network as a motorway in Sky,” he told the BBC.
“When you lose something like monitoring radar coverage for any reason, the ability of your network declines in a country’s lane.
“This is why the system slows down when technical failure.”
Is nuts blamed for outage?
Airlines have been vocal in their criticism, given that this is the second time its system has failed since 2023.
In August 2023, more than 700,000 passengers were affected when some 500 flights were canceled at Britain’s busiest airports due to a large outage.
An airline, Ryanier, has called NATS Chief Executive Officer Martin Rolf to resign, arguing that the previous failure has learned “no lessons”.
Easyzet said that it has “been extremely disappointing to see, yet, again, large failure within our air traffic control system that has reduced the cancellation” with long delays to many customers and in some cases.
Passengers have been urged to check the flight information as some have reached the BBCs, to say that they are temporarily trapped abroad due to disintegration.
However, Mr. Lake told the BBC’s Today program that he did not believe that it was appropriate to call Mr. Rolf to lose his job, arguing that technical failures were “unavoidable” and “recovery was early”.
Even with issues in 2023, Nats is performing well “If you look at the minutes of the outage in a period of years”, they said.
Are Britain’s sky very busy?
Mr. Lake said that NATS performs well compared to other countries – which is also suffering from air traffic glitch – and Wednesday’s issue was a matter of bad luck.
“The airspace of the UK is very busy, of course among the world’s busiest. We are in the busiest time of the year and tomorrow’s failure was in the busiest time of the day, so this is not an ideal situation.”
Due to the congestion in the UK sky, the Heathro Airlines Operators Committee, which represents airlines flying from the airport, has called for a higher runway in the Southeast of England to increase capacity.
The group’s CEO Nigel Vinting said that “NATS operational teams do an unprecedented function” but that the system is “hot running” and “when things go wrong and we lose the system for an hour, the effect is prominent”.
Government of UK has said Heathro, Gatvic and Luteon supports the expansion of airportsBut critics argue that plans will increase emissions and air pollution.
